Why do you believe the project is important to the media industry?
Sylvain Montreuil, Animatix CEO: The advent of GenAI will reshape our industry from the ground up. A Framework for Generative AI is about exploring and pushing the boundaries of what GenAI can achieve for video. Done well, the results are indistinguishable from traditional video production. GenAI holds the promise of cutting the time and effort needed for these projects by a factor of ten, perhaps even a hundred. We are starting to see these benefits materialise already.
The complication is that we require GenAI to be faithful to our creative vision and artistic direction. That is the challenge with much of today’s GenAI tech stack. Today, going from script to screen requires creatives to become prompt engineers and AI model experts. Doing this at scale requires enterprise-grade controls, model governance, legal safeguards, and the ability to license real-world actors for GenAI works.
That is exactly our focus at Animatix: providing an integrated creative environment that unlocks GenAI at scale, where creatives can go from script to screen in ways that are frictionless and intuitive.
Andreas Urbanski, Animatix co-founder: Looking beyond the frontier of what’s possible in GenAI video today, we call out three scenarios for our industry and for society:
- GenAI democratises content creation. For instance, many auteurs struggle to find financing for their projects. Clearly, a technology that cuts timelines and budgets dramatically will have a very empowering effect.
- The audience is the product, and their attention is monetised. In the media industry, the most profitable content is the most engaging content. GenAI promises to unlock compelling machine-generated content at very low marginal cost, tailored to individual users. Will users drown in content that serves profit-seeking or power-seeking motivations? Or will users develop literacy—and tools offer controls—to enable an informed choice?
- Trust and critical reasoning collapse at society-wide scale. GenAI content will soon be indistinguishable from human-generated content. It all seems so real that the human mind is tempted to believe what it sees on the screen. Some humans will react by not trusting any media anymore. Our critical reasoning skills could atrophy if we don’t learn to interrogate our AI helpers. GenAI applied to media and entertainment is a large-scale, multi-decade experiment in cultural evolution.
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What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced as part of your project?
SM: Going from script to screen in a way that is true to the intention of the producers, directors and creatives. Specific challenges included:
- Consistency: AI foundation models are non-deterministic in nature, which requires workarounds to achieve consistency of styles, characters and locations.
- Collaboration: A platform that allows the contributors from the various organisations involved to collaborate effectively – pre-production, production, review.
- Integrated creative environment: The tools landscape today is very fragmented. The video production workflow goes from script to storyboard (i.e., image) to video, spanning half a dozen different product categories, with a handful of leading tools in each. For instance, besides video foundation models, you need to add audio, voice, sound FX and so forth. Specific models excel at specific forms of content (e.g., action scenes versus emotional scenes). New versions of these standalone tools are released almost on a weekly basis, pushing the art of the possible and capturing the world’s attention for a short while. It’s overwhelming for creatives to keep up with this constantly evolving zoo of tools. And it’s downright impossible for studios to roll out such a zoo to a large user population.”
Why did you want to be part of this year’s IBC Accelerator programme?
SM: What is misunderstood by many is that GenAI does not replace human creativity. Rather, it augments human creativity. This is where the needs of professionals are very different from the needs of consumers, who are delighted when GenAI spits out content that is surprising. As professionals, however, we require GenAI content to be faithful to our creative vision and artistic direction. That’s what we wanted to prove: going from script to screen in a way that is true to the intention of producers and directors and consistent with the emotion that a brand wants to evoke.
What can IBC Show attendees expect to see from you in Amsterdam?
SM: We will showcase Animatix, our integrated creative environment that takes a lot of the friction and frustration out of creating GenAI video content, at scale.
See all of this year’s projects at the Accelerator Zone in Hall 14.
