2023-2-16 The Writing

A digital artist can come up with great visuals. Artificial Intelligence can also generate some great visuals. Some may even say that AI generated images are even cooler looking than those made by human hands.

The battle is on among the creatives.

But that’s not what I’m here to say today.

It came to mind though because a story can have some fine characters but what are the characters doing? It’s all about the writing. It’s all about the script. That’s the element of an animated series that I knew wouldn’t be in my personal wheelhouse. A comedian I found on Fiverr delivered a great script with lots of funny moments. Thanks to James D Creviston for his creativity and excellent collaboration.

Artificial Intelligence is still trying to sort out the concept of creative writing, let alone comedy. Chances are, it will attempt to source such comedy from the encyclopedia of the internet, but it will fall short. It’ll probably be like a foreigner trying to tell jokes in his/her non-native tongue. There’s something about the timing. There’s something about the history of what people already know… and playing off of it.

Emotions are something that AI doesn’t have, probably will never have, and if it ever does… God help us. Writing requires emotions if you want a script to move you. It takes a human touch. In the same vein, the character Rex learns more about what it means to be human by having a telepathic connection with his human-alien hybrid son.

Episode 1 has a very moving ending thanks to this element of the plot.

The work continues on! One might ask why I have the time to write a post like this when there is animation work to be doing, and the answer is simple…

My other computer is currently (as I write these words) rendering several characters from Character Animator individually and sequentially in a scene they’re in together. The alpha channel clips will be assembled, cut, and edited in Final Cut Pro X.

Looking forward to sharing a snapshot or two of the scene.