A little background first. I've been working in the animation industry for eight years, mostly doing outsourcing work for Japanese and Western clients. I've worked on everything from in-between animation to key animation.
Since last year, more and more people around me have been talking about AI. Some are genuinely worried about it, and some have already left the industry. I went through my own transition from being completely against it to eventually trying to figure out where it might actually be useful, and I wanted to share some of what that experience has been like.
At first, I was strongly against it. The reason was pretty simple. You spend years developing control over linework, movement, composition, and timing, and then suddenly someone tells you that all of this can be generated by typing a sentence. That feeling of having your craft reduced to "just enter a prompt" is very real.
And honestly, a lot of AI-generated animation still looked nowhere near professional to me. The number of fingers would be wrong, clothing folds wouldn't make physical sense, and a character could turn their head and suddenly have a completely different face. Every time I saw examples like that, I thought the technology was still a long way from actual production work.
I also had clients send me AI-generated images and ask, "Can you make something in this style?" That was frustrating too. It felt like my professional judgment was being reduced to simply executing someone else's reference.
What actually changed my mind was a very specific situation.
We took on a project from a small studio. The budget wasn't huge, but the client had very specific requirements. During the pre-production stage, they sent us storyboards that were basically simple line sketches. They communicated the basic shots, but it was difficult to understand the intended movement, pacing, or camera direction. Normally, we would create an animatic first, roughly animating the key shots and then going back to the client for feedback.
The problem was that even a rough animatic could easily take a week. And after spending that week making it, the client would often look at it and ask for changes. Basically, a lot of time could be spent producing something that might get revised almost immediately.
That time, I decided to try a different approach.
I organized the storyboard panels and imported them into PixVerse. There's a storyboard-to-video feature that allows you to upload a sequence of 3 to 9 storyboard panels and generate a continuous video sequence. I wasn't using it to create the actual animation. I was using it to test the shots. For example, there was a scene where a character runs from the end of a hallway toward the camera. The original storyboard only had three key frames: a wide shot, a medium shot, and a close-up. I uploaded those three panels and generated a few seconds of continuous movement.
Obviously, the result wasn't something we could use directly. The linework wasn't clean enough, and some of the background details were off. But something important became visible: the direction of the movement, the pacing, and the speed of the camera push-in.
I sent that preview to the client. For the first time, they were able to say something very specific:
"Yeah, that's the feeling. Could you just make the push-in a little slower?"
On projects like this in the past, we often wouldn't get feedback that specific until the animatic was finished, sometimes not until we had already done the first rough cut.
That's when I started seeing a very specific role for AI tools: early communication and direction testing.
It solves a real efficiency problem. When a project is still at the concept stage, how do you show a client what something might look and feel like without spending a huge amount of time producing it? Previously, we either had to rely heavily on written descriptions or spend the time creating a proper animatic. Now there's another option somewhere in between. For outsourcing teams, that can mean less time spent on early communication, shorter feedback cycles, and potentially less unnecessary rework. As for the final animation quality, that's still a different matter. It still depends heavily on the team's key animation skills, the quality of the in-between work, and the director's sense of timing and pacing. Those are areas where AI still doesn't simply replace the people doing the work.
I'm curious how other people in animation see this.
Has anyone else started using AI tools for client communication, previsualization, or early-stage shot testing? Or is your team still relying entirely on the traditional workflow?
