Hi, welcome to my blog. I'm thrilled to have you here. I'm going to be talking about all things technology, including AI, real-time video, and related technologies for storytelling and storymaking. We'll dive deep into these fascinating subjects. I'm also going to explore some of the ups and downs of what AI brings to the table as a creative and what the dangers are as well.

It's a complex landscape. To begin, we're going to explore pre-AI, digital art, and post-AI. I want to share how my views on AI have evolved. Let's take a look at some compelling examples and see the evolution firsthand.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been drawn to creating big visions. For a writer or a painter, this comes naturally—working as a solo artist makes it possible to craft expansive stories and bold, imaginative worlds on your own.. But if you are a filmmaker, this can become almost impossible. Film, by its very nature, is a collaborative effort, requiring many talents to bring these visions to life. But at the end of the day, we still have the idea of the Auteur Theory: the Director as the primary creative force behind a film, like Kubrick, Wells, and Hitchcock. Putting this aside, it unfortunately becomes a bigger problem in animation, since unless you're Disney or Pixar, you can't afford the huge capital and talent required to create these animation masterpieces.

I have long wanted to find a way to solve this problem. Can a small team or a solo artist create a full-length animated film? We've seen live-action feature films produced by small teams, but animation is a significant obstacle to making this happen. I was inspired by Brian Taylor, in the 2000s. What made his project so interesting was that Brian was trying to do it himself as a solo artist, with no other help. The film was called “RustBoy,” and it was beautiful and inspiring. The possibilities that this could be done by a solo artist was motivating.

At the end of the day, this beautiful short masterpiece never made it, but it became the inspiration for what I hoped to do in the future.

I myself headed to Hollywood in 2010 to try to sell my feature animation I wanted to make - FranknSon. It became clear that I could sell it, but I'll never be allowed to make it myself. But that's a story for another blog.

As I worked on my Master's thesis, one of the tools I explored in depth was using game engines to address some of these problems. As a filmmaker, VFX, mobile developer, and game designer, this was a natural approach for me. It didn't solve all the problems, but it became another tool that a small team or solo artist could use. So my search continues as I explore how to create my Animations, particularly while working on the film FranknSon. I had an early concept art that I made using various tools from the old days, including poser. I wanted to redesign it.

This was in the early 2000s, and I needed to refresh and rethink how I might approach the animation's style and look (around 2023). The explosion of AI Derivative Models happened in 2020–2022 and started appearing in many web applications in 2023. One web application I came across is called Veed.io. Well, this was more of a video editing web application. It has some early AI features. I took my early FranknSon image of my character emerging from a castle and generated a few new images based on the original image with this tool, which got me thinking about these new possibilities.

These early AI models were strongly influenced by Universal Frankenstein movies, which was not my intention. But it still gave me a place to start redevelopment, FranknSon. In the image below, I asked the AI model to expand the image to show the surrounding landscape. I was surprised by the results. I knew then that the possibilities of using these evolving tools for us would take me to new horizons. I needed to keep exploring the possibilities.

This was something I needed to keep exploring. More to come in my next blog.

Pre - Post, Digital Art, & AI in the New Age.