We were lucky to catch up with Kai & Valerie Tattersall & Jackson recently and have shared our conversation below.

Kai & Valerie, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

Valerie Jackson: We started working together in 2019/2020, when we were both sophomores in college. When COVID hit in 2020, we both moved back to our hometown and lived together, where we really started experimenting with new technologies. Our process involved a LOT of internet research, it was very unglamorous initially. I know there’s a lot out there right now, with newer tools popping up every day, but A.I. was a tough hobby to start back then. Most machines weren’t strong enough and consumer services like ML Runway weren’t around. We quickly adapted the tools we were interested in for Google Colab—a cloud computing site, only to discover people have already done so. There was a mountain of open-source A.I. tools put together by internet communities and made available for free. Our earlier projects would not have been possible without this amazing library of research, and we continue to honor the spirit of accessibility by avoiding closed or corporate models as much as possible.

Kai Tattersall: It took real effort not to rely on the wow-factor of new technological advancements. We were blown away by the things A.I. could do–even more so a few years ago. We’d never encountered something like this. As new iterations came along, it became easier to be distracted by every novel possibility. It took a real effort for us to move away from just experimenting with tools and for us to sit down and say “Ok, this is cool. But what do we actually want to do?” Instead of finding ways to incorporate new tools, we began searching for tools that let us achieve what we wanted. To our surprise, that search took us back to some pretty old-school tools. A lot of the things we wanted to do we could do without A.I.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

We founded our studio, ARTI, in 2022, but we’ve worked with A.I. tools since 2019 when NVIDIA came out with their GauGAN. Together, we made the University of Southern California’s first A.I. animation utilizing this technology. Over the course of the pandemic, we realized the power that machine tools gave independent artists, as we continued to create work under increasingly restricted circumstances. Ever since, we’ve focused on improving the quality of

Over the course of the past 3 years, we have experimented with face swapping, voice cloning, neural radiance fields (3D landscapes), facial augmentation, body morphs, motion capture, style transfers, machine music, generative imagery/video, text-to-image, text-to-video, and countless different combinations. This experimentation inspired us to combine live-action and animation using digital tools, resulting in a workflow that allowed a small team of independent artists to create ambitious projects at an extremely reduced cost and time commitment. We developed a style of “sampled” animation, a collage-esque composition using filmed footage. ARTI’s intentions are to use human work, in collaboration with machines, to produce ambient, immersive stories. Our mission is in our name: to take the insincere connotation out of the word “artificial.” That’s why we chose the name Artificial Animation—ARTI for short.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Kai Tattersall: The philosophy of sampling drives our goal to recreate nature in animation. We combine traditional methods of sampling with new digital tools. These tools allowed us to seek out new ways to incorporate real motion into our projects. We collect moving elements for our projects using filmed and sourced video. Motion from puppets and our own bodies also translated into the movements on screen. What we’re doing is a newer iteration of video collage and rotoscoping. The goal is not to make completely A.I. animations but to use A.I. to broaden the range of what we can sample.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Valerie Jackson: With a background in traditional studio art, I was way out of my depth when I first started working with digital tools. I personally struggled with feeling like I was somehow “cheating”, using A.I. to speed up the rotoscoping process or create visual effects. But the more I spent time immersing myself in the world of machines and connecting with other artists in this sphere, I realized that the goal wasn’t to simply mass produce content, but rather develop a new type of expression. Of course, exploitation of artists’ work and soulless content generation are going to be issues that absolutely must be discussed. However, there are ethical and effective ways of applying these new machine tools to the creative process that exponentially widen the possibilities for independent artists, and allow for brand-new ways of telling stories. The hyperpop legend SOPHIE said it best I think, “..why would any[one] want to limit themselves, you want to work with the most powerful tools you can work with.” Art forms evolve as the world around them does, and filmmaking/animation is not immune to this change.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://artificialanimation.org/

Image Credits
Photographs by Valerie Jackson