UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Artists all over the world grapple with the implications artificial intelligence (AI) will have on their livelihood, and members of Penn State’s Animation Club faced that topic head-on during a nationwide 24-hour animation challenge.
Teams of five or fewer from universities all over the country worked to create a 30-second, original animated short and upload it to YouTube in just 24 hours last fall. Animation Club president Bennett Matthews led the Penn State team through the process.
“I like having a club that’s focused around the thing I’m so passionate about and that I’m going to spend the rest of my life doing,” Matthews, a third-year student majoring in digital arts and media design, said about his time with the Animation Club.
Celine Ugorji, Megan Gale and club treasurer Sam Brooks competed alongside Matthews for the whole challenge from 6 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 4, until 6 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 5. Ben Hoffman participated as the team’s fifth member, but was unable to stay for the full challenge.
The team, except for Gale who helped virtually as a World Campus student, camped out in the Patterson Building computer labs for the duration of the competition. Brooks, also a third-year digital arts and media design student, said division of labor — as well as plenty of caffeine — was important in getting everything done on time.
“We started with a storyboard,” she said. “We came together to come up with a story based on the prompt, so we all got to communally discuss the story in real time. Then we went through and divided up the storyboard by who was doing what.”
Brooks said the entire project pushed her out of her comfort zone in an exciting way and allowed her to collaborate with others differently than how she’s used to working. Months later, she said she looks back fondly on the experience, though staying up and working for that many hours straight strained her mentally and creatively.
“I’ve never been put on the spot like that before, and it really taught me a lot about what I’m capable of doing and learning,” she said. “I’m just insanely proud to see what we pulled together.”
Because this wasn’t the group’s first time competing in the challenge, each member came with goals on how to improve from previous years. Ugorji and Matthews said they were happy to have shown growth since the first time they competed in the competition in 2023.
“We had a very solid and cohesive idea this time, and the end product was something that I’m incredibly proud of,” Matthews said. “I’m proud of our team, too, because we really pulled it together.”
Ugorji, a second-year student double-majoring in digital arts and media design and advertising, said she did not have a “good workflow” her first time working on the challenge. “I spent a lot of time on one small sequence, and I wasn’t proud of taking so much time. This year, I wanted to be a little faster, and I think I was.”
While the team appreciated one another’s creative and collaborative abilities, the challenge’s AI theme was less than popular. In the first hour of the competition, all teams across the nation joined a livestream where host company Legends Animated explained the rules and announced the subject the projects must address.
“We all kind of groaned when we heard the topic,” Matthews said. “I believe there are things that AI cannot do, and the humanity of work is a very important part of the emotional appeal, of the way your audience connects with what you make. The heart of a project isn’t something that can be fabricated or synthetic. I think that’s really what we try to touch on; human heart cannot be replicated by machines.”
The team’s 30-second animation is titled “Dream Job” and can be found on the Animation Club’s YouTube channel.
In the video, a man goes to an interview for what he believes will be his dream job drawing and making animations. He ends up working as a mechanic for a robot that scribbles on a page and breaks down consistently. The short ends with the man looking palpably disappointed as he wipes his face and smudges grease on himself.
Brooks also said she was passionate about how AI has essentially failed the artistic community.
“I thought we would have things that reduce grunt work so that humans could more freely create and progress, but AI is creating more grunt work for people,” she said. “You’re cleaning up something else’s lines instead of having something else clean up what you created.”
Even in a digital medium like animation, the club members said humanity and art go hand-in-hand.
“Humans really do respond to human-centric design, and AI isn’t thinking for itself,” Brooks said. “It never has been.”
According to Matthews, in the field of animation, everything is intentional. “The angle, the speed, where something starts, where it ends and how it gets there — that’s all intentional. So even just AI being used in between frames doesn’t make it better. It can’t make a new idea; it can’t generate a thought for itself. It can only take two things and kind of mush them together, and that’s not what you want when you’re creating.”
Gale studies digital multimedia design through Penn State World Campus, so she wasn’t in person with the rest of the group. However, she said she shared their feelings on AI.
“Human nature being what it is, people are just going to use AI to help them be their laziest selves, and we’re going to wind up with a lot of lazy filler,” she said. “I hope there’s still an appetite for creative stuff.”
Being in the comfort of her own workspace with her own technology and tools, Gale said she felt somewhat liberated from the stress and tension the rest of her team felt during the competition. However, she was happy to help in any way possible and took on multiple different roles relating to the 2D animation and background concepts and design for the project.
“Working on things like this, it really makes you feel like you could participate successfully in a remote work environment,” Gale said. “If you can deliver what people want from you in a crunch situation like this, then you’re probably well prepared to produce something outside of a school environment.”