The animation director behind this summer’s viral We Are Better Than This film says AI has nothing to offer his work. And he’s built a remote studio to prove his point.
If anyone can make anything with just a click of a mouse these days, why bother paying an expert? That’s the frustrating question hanging over many creative careers right now. It’s something Joseph Clark keeps losing sleep over, too.
You might already know him as Joe Bichard, the name he worked under for years. You’ll have seen him on MARS!, which won a Royal Television Society Award in 2010, and on A Self Compassion Exercise, his Alain de Bottomn-scripted short that’s now clocked up 2.5 million views on YouTube. These days, he runs Oh Studio in London, and this summer he directed We Are Better Than This, a campaign film made with illustrator Chris Haughton, a group of children’s authors and artists, and Miriam Margolyes on voiceover. It protests against Big Tech scraping creators’ work and went viral.
So when Joseph popped up in my DMs after I shared a story on Instagram about Canva, Adobe, and where the industry was heading, I was more than happy to reply. He was curious about my take on AI and we had a good chat about the state of play. “An artist must strive to create the new, genuine and fantastic,” he said. “AI by definition is the homogenised average of everything that has come before, so I haven’t really seen anything that particularly appeals to my workflow. It is a huge threat to all of us though.”
What really winds him up isn’t the tools… it’s what’s already showing up in the world. “We’re already seeing products promoted with AI-generated work where the human craft and care behind them feels increasingly absent. For me, that’s a pretty depressing direction for the creative industries to go in. I’m not so sure AI is so great at appreciating human nuance as of yet.”
I asked him how We Are Better Than This came about, and he said it was from a previous job when Joseph and Chris had made a trailer for Chris’s book The History of Information. That was a whistle-stop tour from cave paintings to artificial intelligence that clocked up over a million views on Instagram. “The creative industry has been concerned about what AI and Big Tech are doing for some time,” he says. “But we felt there wasn’t really a piece of work that had communicated concerns quickly and accessibly to a broad audience. We wanted people to come away feeling a bit more awake to what is happening, but also hopeful that we still have some agency in shaping where things go next.”
“The fact that it went on to have a similar viral reach to our original book trailer was a lovely surprise,” he adds, “and I think it showed that the message really resonates with people.”
It does. And it’s encouraging to see it well received, but the worry is that when someone with a tight budget needs something made, will they be prepared to pay for the slower version.
This is one reason Joe’s business is set up the way it is. Before he launched Oh Studio, Joseph freelanced for many of London’s animation agencies, including Nexas, Animade, Studio AKA and Golden Wolf. But he kept noticing the same thing, and it bugged him. “So much of the budget can disappear into running a traditional studio,” he says. “Big buildings in central London, lots of staff and offices sitting half empty between projects, There can be a lot of overhead that doesn’t necessarily make the work better.”
I’ve said this myself for some time. OK, so the larger studios always get hurt during economic difficulties and industry shifts, but at least the freelancers and smaller businesses can compete. And that’s the benefit of working with someone like Oh Studio instead: no building or staff salaries, and “almost no overheads”, as Joseph puts it. “We’ve stripped a lot of that gumph away. We can build the right team around each project, work with brilliant artists wherever they are, and put more of the budget into the actual work and the people making it.”
It’s why his studio manifesto reads, “celebrating the human hands that make the work”. And yes, he works from home and often alone. Given I do the same, I wondered if he ever gets lonely. He does, but he did something about it. He launched SELAPD, the South East London Animation People Drinks, which he runs every other month to bring people in a similar boat together. The idea came about after he, Hannah Lau-Walker, Dan Chester, and Knife shared a cab home from an event once and realised they all lived round the corner from one another.
Of course, another nice bit about running a mean and lean animation studio is that Joseph pays those he collaborates with really well and gives them the space to be creative. Interestingly, he often doesn’t give much of a brief. Like when he needs music and sound, he turns to long-time collaborators, Skillbard, and lets them do what they like. The results are always surprising and exceed his expectations.
I’ve seen this approach before, and it does seem to deliver the goods. I imagine it’s also something AI can’t replicate. And it doesn’t surprise me that Joseph says it’s how his best work got made. His IKEA spot with Tin Sounds was made in just a couple of weeks, and look how that turned out.
So why pay an expert? Joseph says it’s about putting the money where the craft is. Making something original with a bunch of collaborators who get to have the freedom to be creative. And realising you get something no AI could create. It’s food for thought as everything starts to look eerily the same. You want to stand out? Hire a human.
