Hey everyone!
I run a small animation studio. While everything we deliver is still custom, we do use AI every day as an internal assistant to get to the boring work faster.
1. Visualizing vague client ideas before we design anything
Instead of spending 2-3 days designing directions that might be totally off, we generate 10-15 quick visual interpretations first. Not for final use. Just to align on: does "human" mean warm colors + hand-drawn textures, or real people inside a tech world?
2. References for stuff that's hard to find or shoot
This is our most-used one. A clear guidance for the artist:
- weird camera angles you can't easily stage
- hands holding a specific product
- complex machinery/product internals
- complicated character poses
- lighting and perspective refs for complex scenes
Think of it as a super-powered visual research assistant. You still draw/model everything, you just start from a clear target.
3. Expressions, scripts and boring automation
Huge time saver if you're not an expression wizard:
- ask for a starting expression, then debug it together
- clean up and comment old expressions so someone else can read them
4. The AI that's already inside AE + Premiere
Two we use constantly:
- Content-Aware Fill in After Effects: mask the unwanted object/rig/person in the corner, generate fill layer, let AE reconstruct from surrounding frames. Perfect for cleanup shots.
- Scene Edit Detection in Premiere: right-click a flattened render, Premiere finds all the original cuts and makes subclips / markers. No more scrubbing to find 40+ cuts manually.
5. Character performance refs for tricky movement
We don't generate final animation. We generate references for body mechanics when it's impractical to film. For example, wrong proportions, impossible camera angle, stylized character.
What helps most is seeing silhouette, weight shift, and how one pose could transition to the next. Then our animators do the real blocking on top of that.
6. Fixing renders instead of re-rendering
Before you re-render for 6 hours or re-shoot:
- denoise noisy footage/renders
- upscale low-res client assets
- sharpen soft details
Bottom line for us: don't ask "How can AI do my job?". Instead, ask "How can AI remove the boring exploration so I can do my job faster?"
What's the AI use you've actually kept in your workflow?
If you want to see the full breakdown with real examples from our work, you can check out this video: https://youtu.be/naU6nKZ1p4s?si=b_qpffbsMvLOFPdr
