Latest news with #AIAnimation
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Hong Kong Digital Entertainment Association's "2nd Future Animation - AI-Assisted Animation Production Support Scheme"
Support 6 Local Companies in Using AI Technology to Assist in Animation Production Showcases at Annecy Festival and Annecy International Animation Film Market (MIFA) 2025 HONG KONG, June 11, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Organised by the Hong Kong Digital Entertainment Association (HKDEA) and sponsored by the Cultural and Creative Industries Development Agency (CCIDA) of the Hong Kong SAR Government, the "2nd Future Animation – AI-Assisted Animation Production Support Scheme" ("2nd Future Animation" Scheme) is a pioneering initiative aimed at integrating artificial intelligence ("AI") into animation production. This year, the scheme has allocated over HK$5 million to support six selected local companies, each receiving up to HK$850,000 in subsidies and expert guidance to apply Artificial intelligence tools in creating original animated works. The goal is to explore AI's capabilities in original animation produced in Hong Kong, drive innovation, and open up new business opportunities. HKDEA once again sets up the "Hong Kong Pavilion (MIFA)" at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and MIFA 2025 in France. From 10th to 13th June 2025, the six companies selected under the "2nd Future Animation" Scheme showcase their AI-assisted original animations at MIFA, demonstrating the creativity and production strengths of Hong Kong Companies to the global market. The six local companies selected under the "2nd Future Animation" Scheme are honoured to participate in the prestigious event. The opening ceremony of the "Hong Kong Pavilion (MIFA)", organized under the scheme, took place on 10th June 2025, bringing together industry leaders and international guests, including Mrs Lowell CHO, Assistant Commissioner for Cultural and Creative Industries to celebrate the convergence of Hong Kong's creative animation and AI technologies. During the 4-day exhibition of the "Hong Kong Pavilion (MIFA)", the six selected companies under the scheme engage and exchange ideas with animation enterprises from around the world. In addition, the "Hong Kong Partner Pitches" held on 11th June 2025 offer these companies a valuable opportunity to present their projects to international industry professionals and investors, aiming to foster overseas collaboration and attract investment opportunities. This participation also allows them to broaden their horizons and showcase the innovation and creativity of Hong Kong's animation industry to the international market. As one of the most historic and largest international animation festivals, the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and MIFA 2025 has been highly regarded by professionals worldwide. A series of activities takes place this year in Annecy, France from 8th to 14th June 2025, including 4-day MIFA which is a significant annual trade fair for the animation industry, held from 10th to 13th June 2025. The "2nd Future Animation" Scheme sets up the "Hong Kong Pavilion (MIFA)" at the MIFA to help Hong Kong's animation industry explore new business opportunities. Details of the Hong Kong Pavilion's Exhibition, Opening Ceremony and the "Hong Kong Partners Pitches" at the "Annecy International Animation Film Festival and MIFA 2025" are as follows: Exhibition at Hong Kong Pavilion (MIFA)Date: 10th to 13th June 2025Time: Start from 9:00am Hong Kong Pavilion (MIFA)'s Opening CeremonyDate: 10th June 2025 (Tuesday)Time: 3:30pm – 5:00pm (Including networking cocktail party)Venue: Stand C.42, MIFA, Annecy Festival Hong Kong Partners PitchesDate: 11th June 2025 (Wednesday)Time: 2:00pm – 3:15pmVenue: Berlioz Room, 3rd Floor, Impérial Palace For more information about the Hong Kong Pavilion (MIFA) at the "Annecy International Animation Film Festival and MIFA 2025", please visit the website: "2nd Future Animation – AI-Assisted Animation Production Support Scheme" In today's fast-paced world, people can leverage AI as a tool to significantly enhance work efficiency, enabling them to produce works in better quality with limited resources. Hong Kong Digital Entertainment Association (HKDEA) aims to support the industry in seeking breakthroughs and fostering innovation in animation production through the "2nd Future Animation" Scheme. By exploring and applying AI's potential in assisting animation production, the scheme seeks to nurture exceptional works and open up new business opportunities. Building on the remarkable achievements of the first scheme, the "2nd Future Animation" Scheme received an overwhelming response, with numerous qualified applications. The judging committee conducted rigorous assessments and interviews based on creativity and originality, design and artistic quality, storytelling ability/visual impact, as well as the companies' track record, capacity to produce the proposed work, technical capability of mastering AI on production, and commitment to the program. Ultimately, six local companies were selected to receive subsidy. The "2nd Future Animation" Scheme provides comprehensive support to the six selected local companies, helping them enhance their animation production capabilities and develop AI application technologies. Each selected company is granted a maximum subsidy of HK$850,000 to produce a 15-20 minutes long animation work assisted by AI. In addition, the companies receive expert mentoring, allocating two interns from relevant institutions, and access to training on AI-related legal risks, intellectual property, the latest AI tools and trends, as well as experience-sharing seminars. List of six selected companies of "2nd Future Animation – AI-Assisted Animation Production Support Scheme" (arranged in alphabetical order by company name) Company Names Work Title Animation Synopsis 924 Studio Limited Kill Danny 1999 This is a short animation firm named: kill Danny 1999. Which is the third part of the Kill Danny trilogy, a Hong Kong Action-comedy themed IP. The studio aimed to play tribute to the golden-era of Hong Kong film art and recreate the genre, with the world of Kill Danny. The story is about Iron-Fist enjoying his morning with his beloved dog, Popo. Some strange visions kept running though his head…when he woke up, he saw his dog had been hit by a car…And he started his journey of revenge, with his new got power…however, was everything just simply a coincidence? Astro Heart Limited The Dream of Helena This is a story about Helena chasing her dream. A chance discovery in the library sparks her interest in astronomy. Despite her efforts, she faces social challenges and unfair treatment. How will she overcome obstacles and find the strength to move forward? Free D Workshop Roboy The story is set at the edge of a vast desert, where a grumpy mechanic is thrust into a chaotic adventure when a nuclear-powered robot crash-lands at his repair station and a stranded rescue team member commandeers his vehicle for an urgent mission. Joined by a magnetic robot with a mysterious past, this misfit team must navigate treacherous forests, unravel the secrets of a catastrophic power station shutdown, and overcome bizarre challenges—from malfunctioning machines to personal conflicts. With its blend of humor, striking visuals, and heartfelt storytelling, this high-voltage adventure sparks an unforgettable journey of growth and unexpected friendships. ManyMany Creations Ltd Nine The story is about the main character waking up on time, starting work on time, leaving the office on time, having meals on time, and going to sleep on time. He works in a micro space station on a tiny moon orbiting a mega planet—day after day, night after night. Is it real? Is it life? He never thinks about questions like these—until she shows up. She wants to disrupt his routine. She tries to short-circuit him. Why does she want to do that? Can she succeed in saving him from this loop? Morph Workshop Silili & Tree The desire for balance seems to be a fundamental aspect of our nature, deeply rooted in our genes… Silili & Tree is a story delving into the idea of balance—not just for individuals, but also for communities and the wider world. By seeking balance, Silili harnesses the power of frequency and resonance to embark on a transformative journey toward becoming a tree spirit. From the moment she left her mother tree, she—like the other elves—was searching for an ideal to become. However, she didn't realize that her journey had inadvertently harmed one tree while saving the plants of an entire island... Stepc Depths of Light The story is about what happens when matter collides, light is born—but what kind of light? What form will it take? These are not choices we can make... For details about "2nd Future Animation – AI-Assisted Animation Production Support Scheme", please visit our website: About Hong Kong Digital Entertainment Association (HKDEA)Established in 1999, HKDEA is a non-profit organisation aiming to promote digital entertainment development in Hong Kong. Its mission points toward the achievement of the following goals - boosting prosperity of the digital entertainment industry by fostering cooperation among local developers; opening up and development of digital market; enhancement of local technology so as to raise the competitiveness of Hong Kong production; promoting communication between digital entertainment industry and other related industries such as toys, entertainment and visual games; building a favourable image for digital entertainment; and protection of intellectual property rights and scrapping counterfeit products. For more information, please visit HKDEA's website at About Cultural and Creative Industries Development Agency (CCIDA)The Cultural and Creative Industries Development Agency (CCIDA) established in June 2024, formerly known as Create Hong Kong (CreateHK), is a dedicated office set up by the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region under the Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau to provide one-stop services and support to the cultural and creative industries with a mission to foster a conducive environment in Hong Kong to facilitate the development of arts, culture and creative sectors as industries. Its strategic foci are nurturing talent and facilitating start-ups, exploring markets, promoting cross-sectoral and cross-genre collaboration, promoting the development of arts, culture and creative sectors as industries under the industry-oriented principle, and promoting Hong Kong as Asia's creative capital and fostering a creative atmosphere in the community to implement Hong Kong's positioning as the East-meets-West centre for international cultural exchange under the National 14th Five-Year Plan. CCIDA's website: View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE The Hong Kong Digital Entertainment Association Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Fast Company
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Fast Company
Cartwheel uses AI to make 3D animation 100 times faster for creators and studios
After years of AI disrupting industries and streamlining repetitive workflows, the technology is now poised to transform animation. In 2024, director and writer Tom Paton's AiMation Studios released Where the Robots Grow, a fully AI-animated feature film. Everything from animation and voice acting to music was generated using AI, at a cost of just $8,000 per minute—totaling around $700,000 for the 87-minute production. While IMDB reviewers criticized the film as 'soulless and uninspired,' it proved that AI can deliver full-length animated features at a fraction of traditional budgets. But it's not just filmmakers driving this shift. Indie game developers want to prototype characters and worlds in hours, not weeks. TikTok and social media creators are looking to animate original characters without studio resources. Major brands, too, seek emotionally resonant storytelling without monthslong timelines or ballooning 3D animation costs. The challenge: most 3D animation tools are still slow, technical, and expensive. Hoping to remove these barriers, a team of developers from OpenAI, Google, Pixar, and Riot Games launched Cartwheel, an AI-powered 3D animation platform. Cartwheel promises to make high-quality 3D character animation 100 times faster, simpler, and more affordable. Users can record motion with a smartphone, describe a scene with a text prompt, or pull from a library of expressive 3D movements. The platform's AI transforms input into production-ready animations. Artists can refine them in Cartwheel or export into tools like Unity, Unreal Engine, Maya, or Blender—without disrupting their pipeline. The startup was cofounded by Andrew Carr, a former OpenAI scientist who helped develop Codex and ChatGPT's code generation, and Jonathan Jarvis, former creative director at Google Creative Lab and founder of the animation studio Universal Patterns. The two met after OpenAI, intrigued by Jarvis's concept for a generative animation tool, introduced him to Carr, who had just left the company to explore how AI could make animation more accessible. 'I had a unique job, where I used animation to share complex research concepts clearly within Google, and make prototypes that couldn't yet be built by software. Andrew always wanted to animate, and later invented a way to 'talk' to Blender, a popular open-source 3D software, with computer code,' says Jarvis. 'We always wanted to build tools to help others get ideas moving and sensed the potential to animate in new ways using gen AI, that it would be centered around creative control.' After two years in stealth, Cartwheel is gaining traction. The company recently closed a $10 million funding round led by Craft Ventures, with support from WndrCo (Jeffrey Katzenberg), Khosla Ventures, Accel, Runway, and Tirta Ventures (Ben Feder), bringing total funding to $15.6 million. Over 60,000 animators, developers, and storytellers joined Cartwheel's wait-list during stealth. Early adopters from DreamWorks, Duolingo, and Roblox are already using the platform. 'All of our AI models are developed in-house. Behind the scenes, we've employed careful software engineering to ensure that all the pieces of our system work together in a way that can be plugged into existing animation pipelines,' Carr says. 'Ensuring that the generated animation is properly scaled, moves naturally, and remains consistent throughout has been one of our biggest challenges.' A Creator-First AI Animation Tool While the generative AI field is increasingly crowded, Cartwheel positions itself differently: not as a replacement for artists, but as a tool that amplifies their creativity. 'Animators and creatives don't care if motion is generated, done by hand, motion-captured, or drawn from a library. They just want it to move to tell their story, make their game, or get their job done,' Jarvis says. 'Our motion models can generate a lot of useful animation quickly, but they can't do everything. That's why we love a hybrid approach. Computers are great at finding patterns, but it's the artist who brings the soul.' A key differentiator for Cartwheel is its team. Carr and Jarvis are joined by industry veterans with experience in film, games, and interactive design. Catherine 'Cat' Hicks, former Pixar animation director on Coco, Inside Out, and Toy Story 3, serves as head of Animation Innovation. Neil Helm, head of Interactive Animation, worked on crowd systems at Pixar for Turning Red, Lightyear, Up, and Inside Out 2. The platform's design is shaped by Steven Ziadie, former Sony and Riot designer, while production is led by Buthaina Mahmud, who helped define Unity's real-time animation workflows and developed shaders used in the Spider-Verse films. 'We reached out, and some reached out to us. Over time, we realized we all shared the goal to make storytelling faster, easier, and more powerful,' Carr and Jarvis tell Fast Company. 'Culture is being shaped in increasingly dynamic, interactive, and immersive spaces like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox —all animation-driven experiences. We're building tools for where animation is headed, and that's resonating with industry veterans.' User feedback has helped shape Cartwheel's interface. 'We began with a focus on text to animation. In beta, we learned that while that's compelling in many situations, often folks want to browse motions for inspiration, use video reference, or act out the motion themselves—so we've moved to a multimodal interface,' Carr says. What's Next for Cartwheel? High-quality animation data remains scarce, with most data sets proprietary or lacking in diversity and detail. To address this, Cartwheel is using synthetic data—AI-generated animations that mimic real-world motion—to train and refine its models. 'The next generation of AI companies has to find and curate the hard data types, and do the hard work to refine it and make it useful to people in that field. That's where the value is,' Carr says. 'While at OpenAI, I worked on the science of data quality and was able to generate millions of dollars of model improvements with just a few lines of code. We are following the same path at Cartwheel to ensure we produce the styles, qualities, and delightfulness in our motion data that artists need.' With fresh funding, Cartwheel plans to deepen R&D, grow its team, and bring its platform to broader markets. 'Over the next 12 months, we aim to be a catalyst, enabling both large and small animation projects to flourish,' Jarvis says. 'Ensuring ethically sourced data that empowers artists is fundamental to our approach. We are a team of artists building tools for artists.'
The National
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
'What is Abu Dhabiness?' Exhibition challenges AI's stereotypical view of the UAE at Venice Biennale
At Zayed University, a student's attempt to portray the UAE through AI animation repeatedly hit a wall. The software kept defaulting to deserts and opulent skylines, ignoring the diversity of the country's urban landscape and culture. This frustration served as inspiration for four faculty members at the university. They began building a new image database aimed at offering a richer, more accurate visual language for Emirati architecture and culture, particularly that of Abu Dhabi. 'The student had this really interesting story prepared and wanted to have the culture and architecture represented in it,' multimedia professor Omair Faizullah says. 'But no matter what she did, she could not get the results she wanted. Instead, it kept generating a stereotypical form – like an Instagram picture – which is not exactly the representation of the area and its culture.' Enter The Dis-Orientalist, which is being showcased at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The project was developed as a collaboration between Faizullah and Lina Ahmad, Marco Sosa and Roberto Fabbri, faculty members from the architecture and interior design department. It amasses a new data pool of images of architecture from Abu Dhabi in an AI model that offers a more nuanced perspective of the emirate. The Dis-Orientalist came directly as a result of technology's evident misinterpretation of the UAE, but it has grown to present significant pedagogical and architectural potential. The project's title is a pun, referencing to an exotic and static perception of the region, but also to a state of disorientation caused by AI. 'We are disoriented by this technology and how these technologies are coming into the field of architecture,' Fabbri says. 'These new tools are changing the profession and we are trying to understand how we should interact with that, but it is also changing teaching in schools and universities. That's where we start putting those two meanings together.' AI is only as good as the data it relies its intelligence on. As such, the team behind The Dis-Orientalist set out to collect thousands of images of structures in Abu Dhabi, most of them examples of modernist architecture. The photographs, Ahmad notes, were sourced from Abu Dhabi Streets, the Instagram account run by Silvia and Alex, European expatriates who have lived in Abu Dhabi for close to a decade. 'We went and looked at the lesser-known Abu Dhabi,' Ahmad says. 'The buildings that were mostly constructed in the late 80s and the 90s.' 'We were interested in collecting the data,' Fabbri adds. 'That's because without a data set, there's no project and the data set defines and determines the output of the project. Thanks to Silvia and Alex, we were able to put together 7,000 image of lesser-known pieces of Abu Dhabi.' Through a grant from Zayed University, the four faculty members began developing an AI model that would come to generate images of new structures based on these 'lesser-known' examples. This was no straight-forward task, and required the team to develop a visual lexicon of architectural elements within the images - pinpointing what constitutes a door or a window. 'The way that things are put together, especially in an architectural pattern, it's all based on a canonical structure,' Faizullah says. 'A window, door or facade can be put together in infinite configurations. The training involved feeding the AI all of these images, and asking the algorithm to start to understand what's what. Especially with the architecture of the UAE, a lot of these terminologies are not very defined. We had to create our own method of introducing those kind of that kind of topology into the training.' The technology, Ahmad adds, may also help identify what is 'Abu Dhabiness'. 'We all live in Abu Dhabi,' she says. 'We look at buildings and neighbourhoods, and we see what we call Abu Dhabiness. But what does that mean? I think that the software is one of the things that we try to extract the DNA of Abu Dhabi, and not only that, but also generate infinite examples of an impossible Abu Dhabi that feels so familiar, but yet it doesn't exist in real life.' So what are the implications for a technology such as The Dis-Orientalist? Faizullah says that it has 'tremendous educational potential, whereby students can sort of learn, understand the history of the region, its cultural heritage, its visual language, and then use it to create newer things". The platform, Ahmad adds, offers 'an infinite example of regional architecture, something that's vernacular, something that's from the region where students could keep looking at and feeding into their design". This may spark a resurgence of modernist elements in contemporary designs, but Fabbri adds that the team is not advocating a modernist renaissance, but rather proposing a new educational platform that may have inspire new techniques and trends in contemporary design. 'Perhaps if you have an intervention in the city centre, maybe then you want to harmonise the new intervention with the existing structure,' he proposes. The project, the faculty members note, is still in its early stage and the aim is to make it as accessible as possible – or, as Ahmad puts it, 'to democratise the conceptual process of conceptual design'. 'We're also thinking of, how can we use the tool to open it beyond architecture?' Ahmad adds. 'So we're starting to have this conversation and dialogues with different disciplines and inviting them to contribute or to think of how this can be appropriated.' The exhibit at the Venice Architecture Biennale is a sneak peek of The Dis-Orientalist. The faculty members are planning to offer a more comprehensive look at the project in a more immersive exhibition, this time presented locally. 'This is our first exhibition for The Dis-Orientalist,' Ahmad says. 'It's in the pipeline to showcase this in a local exhibition.'
