Could artificial intelligence start making the movies we love?

Technology, says Nalbandian, is one of the three pillars that drives Animal Logic – the other two being the group's strong creative department, and its ability to make commercially viable products – and now the technology is driving Animal Logic into a whole new world: artificial intelligence and machine learning. The artificial-intelligence technology, made popular by applications such as Google's Assistant and Amazon's Alexa voice assistants, is already being adopted by the global animation and visual-effects industries to cut out some of the processor-intensive work that computers have to do, and, says Nalbandian, it's going to be adopted at Animal Logic to cut out some of the labour-intensive work that the company's humans have to do, too. In 2018 Animal Logic hired its first chief technology officer, Darin Grant, an industry veteran who was previously in charge of production technology at Steven Spielberg's legendary DreamWorks Animation, and who later went on to work at Google. Speaking from his base in Los Angeles (Animal Logic now has offices in Los Angeles and Toronto, as well as its headquarters at Fox Studios in Sydney), Grant points out that there are computer-related tasks in the animation and visual effects industry that have been moved over to machine learning, simply because the technology is more efficient. Rather than animate characters like i Peter Rabbit /i's Flopsy, Mopsy, Benjamin and Cottontail themselves, Animal Logic's artists may one day be able to teach an AI machine how to do it, leaving the artists free for even more ambitious work.