Director Juan Delcan and the crew at Sandblast Productions in New York used AI to generate select visual assets for this 16-minute animated doc about the AI revolution including all of the environments and several character designs.

Katherine Burke, CD at Sandblast: “Schmidt Futures came to us in early 2022 to make a video that took the main concepts from the book “The Age of AI: Our Human Future”, written by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher, and make them digestible and engaging enough to spread its message to a wider audience.

“As our team read the book and dug deeper into the subject, we had no idea we were embarking on a journey that would become so pivotal. 2022 marked a major turning point in the world’s recognition of the importance and potential impact of AI, and the publicly available AI systems.
 

“Through this design, we aimed to convey the message that, despite its remarkable capabilities, AI still requires the guiding hand of humanity in order to reach its full potential.”

 
“Just weeks into our work, image creators like MidJourney and Dall-E became accessible, and we were tempted to rely on them for all our visual needs. However, we soon realized that this would be a mistake: by the time our documentary was complete, the technology would likely have advanced so far as to render our efforts obsolete.

“To bring a human element to our film, our director Juan Delcan designed characters that were a hybrid of two iconic architectural figures: the Vitruvian man and Le Corbusier’s Modulor, symbolizing the intersection of art, science, and humanity that lies at the heart of the AI revolution.

“Through this design, we aimed to convey the message that, despite its remarkable capabilities, AI still requires the guiding hand of humanity in order to reach its full potential.”
 
 

 
Client: Schmidt Futures

Production: Sandblast Productions
Director: Juan Delcan
EP: Katherine Burke
Designer/animator: Juan Delcan
Producer/editor: Julia Baker

Audio: Sandblast Productions
Composer: Loren Toolajian
Sound Mix: Ralph Kelsey
VO: Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, Daniel Huttenlocher