If you are like us, your head is spinning with all the AI content that seems to render human media-art skills superfluous.

Nolan's The Odyssey is being celebrated for being filmed with old school "film", with all the humans it takes, all the chemicals, and hefting and shipping of heavy IMAX cameras and film.

Why not do it with AI? Youtube is full of Odyssey themed video in AI. Cheaper, faster, and more flexible creatively.

Youtube also has plenty of how-to videos on how to run an abacus.

What? In the age of super computer data center computation, and where everyone has a calculator on their cell phone, why isn't an Abacus as extinct as the Dodo bird?

From whence this Luddite craze?

Maybe a reason might appear if we ask WHY other technologies are not obsolete in the face of progress.

Why in the mid 1800s did photography NOT snuff out portrait or landscape painting? It eliminated all the messy paint mixing, brush cleaning, trial and error. And if you were a portrait artist, it eliminated the tendency to "not quite get the eyes right" in your subject.

In the 1920's, why didn't the player-piano cancel concert pianists or even just piano lessons in general?

Or more recently, why the resurgence or even the existence of:

• Vinyl Records vs. Streaming Music

• Mechanical Watches vs. Smartwatches

• Librarians vs. Search Engines

• Paper Journaling vs. Blogging

Or more to point:

Writers/Reporters/Poets vs ChatGPT

Watercolors/Pencil/Paint Illustrations vs. GenerativeAI, etc.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

As a platform that advocates media skills education early and often, Animating Kids advocates for using kid-created, hand-drawn paper cut-outs, animated one-frame-at-a-time.

The Abacus-of-Media-Ed?

Stop motion is over 100 years old, and it isn't going anywhere soon.

And our movies are ugly. Rough around the edges. Scrappy.

Try as we have, we can't get AI to replicate a crudely drawn, poorly lit, messy stop motion movie a 9 years old can produce.

Why would it want to?

Turns out the human factor is very difficult to replicate, And this is a positive in an age where the human component of creative output is getting scarce.

Real humans, in groups, collaborating on storytelling projects, frame-by-frame is a real dodo bird on the surface. Underneath, it is humanly authentic and unreproducible by machine.

Cave paintings, as it were, in an age of AI slop.

For the little humans making movies by hand, turns out slowing things way down is a great way to team build, problem solve, comprehend and create meaning.

Real human made meaning. Driven by hand made math at 15 frames per second.

For you further consideration, as we mused upon this, we found this wonderful meditation on the same topic by internet marketing guru Seth Godin. Click here to read. Number 2 at the bottom of his post is the sweetspot where hand-made media skills reside.

Just some thoughts on a random weekday in Summer.

Bon Animate!

The Team at Animating Kids

PS Go grab our Creator Lab Starter Kit here if you want to play at formulas culled from Animating Kids