Inside Disney’s Animation Secrets: How Brandon Violette Crafts Stories That Come to Life
Ashley
So, I think that’s excellent advice, you know, double down on the things that are working and keep trying as many things as you can. So, what’s your take on AI? I mean, it seems to me that the animation industry is going to be impacted by AI before the live action industry. But maybe that’s just an outside observer who knows nothing about animation. But what’s your take on it? Where do you see AI going and how is it going to impact animation?
Brandon Violette
Yeah, hot question. So, okay, I have a view of it. It’s not actively used right now in our day-to-day, the writers’ room. It’s not there, yet, maybe it will be. But I kind of equate it to, because you can’t escape it, and it’s coming. And so, I think, you know, the movie Reds, the Warren Beatty film Reds from like 1981, old movie star, Warren Beatty with Jack Nicholson, and Diane Keaton is in there. And he was, of course, the star of the movie, the writer, director, producer. And I read his biography. He shot so much footage for that movie that his editor, Dee Dee Allen, who was eventually nominated for an Oscar, he had a team of editors to sift through all his footage, to put Reds together, the movie he shot. And he was criticized as not being a director, but a selector. He just shot all the footage, and then he made a selection later. I could see AI going that way where we’re selectors, because if you could just create anything with just a few prompts, then how do you make sense of it? What do you do? We all have our own personal taste. So, I don’t know if trying to write the perfect script with AI is the way to go, because what is perfection? It’s taste and it’s point of view. So, I could see us evolving into selectors. How widely adopted it’ll be? I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s coming for sure. But it’s not like day-to-day use yet. But yeah, that’s kind of how I think. I think of the Warren Beatty Reds analogy, being selectors.
