Julio Covacho is co-CEO of Quantic Brains and his professional career has always been linked to audiovisual production with a focus on children's audiences. In fact, for 17 years he worked at Zinkia, Pocoyo's audiovisual production company. He is now immersed in several projects such as Untaled Entertainment, SL-audiovisual production company for the development of series for children, an animation short, and Trasto Books, a publisher of personalised stories.
We highlight the Quantic Brains Technologies project, a newly created company dedicated to the generation of movies, series, video games and music with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Its goal is to democratize the creation of audiovisual content with AI-powered tools for professionals and non-professionals.
We speak with Julio Covacho, co-CEO of Quantic Brains:
"We want to create a platform where anyone can create their own audiovisual content."
How was Quantic Brains born and what phase is it in?
The idea comes from Manu, one of the three founding partners together with Roy and me. He is an expert in artificial intelligence, he presented the project to Demium, which is a startup incubator based in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and in some European countries and they found the idea very attractive. Then Roy joined, who is the most visual and graphic development mind and in the end, as in almost every project, you have to put a grayer and darker leg that is organization, financial management; who contacted me and told me about the project. I found it very interesting and super ambitious and I said why not?
We are now in full product development, in contact with different production companies to seek the development and application of our technology, which in the end is based on the comprehensive development of an audiovisual or video game product through the application of artificial intelligence.
The idea is generated, the product is animated and finished without practically human intervention. Thus we are seeing how it is applicable to production systems, the 'pipelines' of the closest studios, to then take the leap and reach the goal we want to reach, which is to create a platform in which anyone without the need for knowledge of audiovisual production or video games and without the need to have the hardware and software required to make a production; You can create your own content, share it, teach it or view a friend's.
"AI is already capable of generating stories."
Your vision is that in just 5 years the majority of movies, series and video games will be generated automatically with little or no human intervention. Is it reality or science fiction?
Well, this was science fiction a few years ago, when we watched movies in which beings similar to humans were able to talk and deceive us. But it turns out that every day we see that by separate ways, the different tools and technologies that exist are converging and are already capable of doing the whole process.
We have all seen very famous or well-known characters talking in advertisements and there is not a very big difference from reality. The development of current technology is much more advanced than what we possibly see in commercial applications. It is about putting everything together, shaking the cocktail shaker and that each of the parts or pieces of that artificial intelligence and technologies linked to it come together to generate content. Something that is already capable of being done today, with a lot of work, but without great complexity.
"We try to bring reading closer to children and make them part of the stories"
Application of AI to the audiovisual sector
The project is super ambitious but we are proposing a very important revolution in the way of working with animation. For example in animation, which is where my heart has been very trapped, the approach that we make in the end means that certain work that artists do today in a manual and very meticulous way, ends up being done by a machine.
