These aren't necessarily original fantasies, but my mind just wanders on occasion to the topic of how animation — as in, animated TV shows and movies — could be made in a classless, stateless, moneyless society. These are pretty unorganized, rambly thoughts, but I hope you find them interesting.

To begin with, I can imagine people sharing short ideas online, then more and more people pile on their ideas onto these basic ideas, then somebody compiles those ideas into a full script and shares it, somebody finds that script and prescores it, somebody finds that prescore and adds storyboards, somebody finds those storyboards and makes key animation, somebody finds the key animation and makes in-betweens. Each "somebody" in this process could be a team of several people, too, at the same time as communism by massively reducing each person's workload will give us a lot more time to make art.

Culturally, I think animation produced under the Mode of Production of Communism will be marked by a spirit of audience participation and spontaneity or ad libbing, if not a total erasure of any idea of a distinction between author and audience: these works, after all, belong to humanity as a whole, people can of course have their contributions acknowledged but not claim the whole work for themselves. Following from this, there will be an embrace of the amateur, imperfect and incomplete. Take the process outlined in the previous paragraph: an online thread of people riffing on each other's ideas is already a complete artwork. A script is also itself already a complete artwork, as is a prescore without visuals (or contrarily visuals without a score), as is an animatic of storyboards with a score, as is a fully-scored animation without in-betweens, as is for that matter an animatic with a few seconds of animation or an animation with a few seconds of storyboards, or an animation that's almost fully prescored except there's no voices or there's no music or whatever else. There's no expectation that everything has to be done at the same time and released as a "finished product", or that things need to be done quickly, because creativity for the sake of creativity is always worth it. If your art style looks a bit wonky, then why should that be shamed? You're baring your subjectivity, your personal growth, the whole creative process, in this artwork. That's a good thing, it means you aren't alienated from yourself. If somebody who's practiced drawing a lot more wants to try redoing your drawings, then that doesn't mean your artwork is "bad" or "inferior", it's just two people's takes on the same idea. Very flashy or complex animation might be seen as wasteful, but I'm sure it won't disappear entirely, in which case it's a good thing that humanity's collective computing infrastructure now belongs to humanity in general as well.

Also vitally important is that everything will be open-source — as in, you can find all the individual drawings and audio files and (future equivalent to) OpenToonz/Blender/Kdenlive/Audacity/LibreOffice files in a repo — and that every work of art from previous modes of production will be public domain. Want to reuse or trace animation assets? Go ahead! Want to sample something for music or sound effects? By all means! Want to adapt an old work from the capitalist era? Who's stopping you! The work of previous generations was carried out to let you play, and in this way, the amount of work needed to make new animation can be reduced even more… Which isn't to say that the creative process needs to become as quick and frictionless as possible — that is a very bourgeois techbro attitude to have — but that it's still nice for people to have options, I guess. The same goes for machine-generated (so-called ""AI"") content: it might still occasionally be used for "placeholders" in some art under communism, but the whole mindset of the so-called ""AI artist"" will be totally eradicated because there is no stigma against "imperfect" or "unfinished" or "amateur" art. ""AI artists"" are people who deny themselves opportunities to be creative because they merely want to be seen as "creative", they want to "make" art seen as "valuable", when the real value has always been in the act of creation itself, right? So basically, except in a handful of extremely specific circumstances where it might be better to use machine-generated imagery, people will just reuse human-made assets if they need a placeholder and don't want to bother making it themselves, or they will just do something hacky and DIY because they don't want to deny themselves opportunities to be creative.

Machine learning and accessibility

So the main role that machine learning technologies will have in animation made under the Mode of Production of Communism is accessibility, I'd say. The animations being open-source is also especially important with regard to accessibility. So let's talk about accessibility.

A pretty obvious point: speech to text and machine translation can generate subtitles that are mostly good, and then people can fix them up. Sure. You can also use machine learning technologies to help create SDH and audio description scripts (to be read by a narrator) or captions (for a braille display for the deafblind), but again, obviously, don't let the machine do all the work unsupervised. You're inevitably going to have to spend a lot of time fixing it up. My own experiences using speech to text to help me write subtitles have been mixed, but I can see how other people could find it a time saver.

Some less obvious points:

Firstly: dubbing and audio description. if anybody can access animations with voice tracks disabled, then anybody can record dubs into different languages. And since people can use voice converters now, one person could play every character, or different people could play the same character. It isn't immediately obvious whether voice converter voice acting should be seen as a "placeholder" thing, though. I do think that, if possible, natural human voices are better, more social in their production, and what most people would prefer. At the same time, if all voices are done through voice conversion, then if one person wants to retake a few lines or change some lines in the script, then they can do their takes and seamlessly weave them in without it jarringly sounding like a character changed voices midway through.

Text-to-speech is also an option for "voice acting", of course, but generally a step below voice conversion in terms of preferability. At the same time, communism might bring with it more acceptance for voice-over dubs, hacky or inconsistent voice acting, or voice actors in one language sounding very different from those in another language. It all depends on what people want to do with a given project.

All of this also goes for audio description tracks for the blind and visually impaired, of course.

Secondly: sign language. You have access to the animation assets themselves! So why not create a version of the animation where people can use mocap to make the characters themselves sign? I wrote about this "Open Sign Language Animation Project" for my future fiction project: crowdsourcing was used to identify and change scenes that would be problematic in a sign language version, fan labor would be used for the 3D models, and then a video-to-video converter trained on the original oral version of the 2D animation would optionally be used to convert 3D sign language mocap models into 2D animation, which could be touched up by humans. A potential benefit to sign language animation, aside from accessibility for Deaf people and promoting sign language proficiency in hearing people, is that the characters signing means you no longer have to worry about lipsync in dubbing. So that could reduce a burden, at the same time as it does also get rid of a big part of the art of dubbing.

If you want to use an intepreter in the corner instead, then this would probably take the form of a 3D rig. By the time humanity transitions to communism, methods of writing sign language have probably become entrenched and easy to write on a computer keyboard, so I'm imagining you could have outright sign language subtitles that could be automatically animated as a 3D rig. Or you could use mocap, or, perhaps less advisably, video-to-video converters. Any of these would mean that if a person thinks a particular part of the interpretation is off, then they can fix it and seamlessly weave their correction into the overall interpretation without the interpreter jarringly turning into a different person for one sentence.

There is of course plenty more to media accessibility than what I've touched on here, and open source can of course help with the points I haven't touched on as well, like triggering content, colorblindness and low vision, epilepsy, that sort of thing.

The position of animation as an art form

Under communism, people won't be alienated from their local communities, and people will favor sustainable living where technology is durable and no more complex than it has to be, right? Given this, there will probably be an explosion of things like improv, theater, puppet shows, all comparatively low-tech forms of performance that are enjoyed by communities together, where both performers and audience work together. Animation has under capitalism tended to be a much more solitary thing than that, the same way as live action shows and movies. Cinemas have historically been the most communal form of engaging with these media, but even so cinemas have grown less and less communal over the decades, and have been overtaken by TV and home video first, and now streaming, successively less communal forms of engagement. Animation has been an un-interactive, escapist medium under capitalism.

Yet, at the same time, it's a wonderful medium. It's something people can make together across completely opposite ends of the planet in a way that isn't really feasible for live action, and it's oftentimes easier to localize animation for different regions and languages. In that way, as far as audiovisual media go, animation is easier to produce under quarantine/lockdown/social distancing, and it can also be an incredibly international medium that connects different countries and cultures together.

Taking these different traits of animation into account… What's to say people's enjoyment of animation under communism couldn't also be communal? Lively cinemas like in the old days, what's to say you couldn't have live fandubbing sessions like some conventions already do now? Call and response segments? Audiences contributing animation to the story live? It's much to ponder.

There's also the matter of being "post-scarcity". Which is to say, there exists today so much animation that any person alive could never run out of works that speak to them. This doesn't mean that people will just stop creating animation, because I think people will always love the medium and have new stories to tell as the world changes; but the amount of animation that gets created won't be dictated by market forces oversaturating the market with overly long movies with inflated budgets and a deluge of TV shows with inflated budgets as well. Animated movies under communism will probably be shorter, how many shows get made with how many episodes depends on if there are people invested enough to make the next episode. But given I'm well on the way to making the second episode of my own animated series that I'm making all by myself, it probably wouldn't take that much to keep certain shows running indefinitely, with splits in the timeline every time somebody decided to "fork" it — without copyright, there is after all no distinction between canon and fanfiction.

But yeah, even if one person alone could make a whole animated series, would they? Or would they choose to make their project a collaboration with the people in their community? I think they probably would choose the latter in most cases.

This would also mean that monoculture would "die twice" — the first time to individualism, the second time to communality, as without advertising or algorithmically curated centralized streaming services, each community would be left to develop its own media preferences, discovering new things through word of mouth.

That'd be nice, wouldn't it.

{Cēterum|Furthermore} {cēnseō|I think} {iūs auctōris|copyright} {esse dēlendum|must be destroyed}.