{"id":14094,"date":"2019-01-31T23:03:41","date_gmt":"2019-01-31T23:03:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/digital-influencers-and-the-dollars-that-follow-them.html"},"modified":"2019-01-31T23:03:41","modified_gmt":"2019-01-31T23:03:41","slug":"digital-influencers-and-the-dollars-that-follow-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/digital-influencers-and-the-dollars-that-follow-them.html","title":{"rendered":"Digital influencers and the dollars that follow them"},"content":{"rendered":"

Animated characters are as old as human storytelling itself, dating back thousands of years to cave drawings that depict animals in motion. It was really in the last century, however \u2014 a period bookended<\/a> by the first animated short film in 1908 and Pixar\u2019s success with computer animation with Toy Story from 1995 onward \u2014 that animation leapt forward. Fundamentally, this period of great innovation sought to make it easier to create an animated story for an audience to passively consume in a curated medium, such as a feature-length film.<\/p>\n

Our current century could be set for even greater advances in the art and science of bringing characters to life. Digital influencers \u2014 virtual or animated humans that live natively on social media \u2014 will be central to that undertaking. Digital influencers don\u2019t merely represent the penetration of cartoon characters into yet another medium, much as they sprang from newspaper strips to TV and the multiplex. Rather, digital humans on social media represent the first instance in which fictional entities act in the same plane of communication as you and I \u2014 regular people \u2014 do. Imagine if stories about Mickey Mouse were told over a telephone or in personalized letters to fans. That\u2019s the kind of jump we\u2019re talking about.<\/p>\n

Social media is a new storytelling medium, much as film was a century ago. As with film then, we have yet to transmit virtual characters to this new medium in a sticky way.<\/p>\n

Which isn\u2019t to say that there aren\u2019t digital characters living their lives on social channels right now. The pioneers have arrived: Lil\u2019 Miquela<\/a>, Astro<\/a>, Bermuda<\/a> and Shudu<\/a> are prominent examples. But they are still only notable for their novelty, not yet their ubiquity. They represent the output of old animation techniques applied to a new medium. This TechCrunch article <\/a>did a great job describing the current digital influencer landscape.<\/p>\n

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More investors are betting on virtual influencers like Lil Miquela<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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So why haven\u2019t animated characters taken off on social media platforms? It\u2019s largely an issue of scale \u2014 it\u2019s expensive and time-consuming to create animated characters and to depict their adventures. One 2017 estimate stated that a 60 to 90-second animation took about 6 weeks<\/a>\u00a0to create. An episode of animated TV takes between 1<\/a>\u2013<\/a>3<\/a> months to produce, typically with large teams in South Korea doing much of the animation legwork. That pace simply doesn\u2019t work in a medium that calls for new original content multiple times a day.<\/p>\n

Yet the technical piece of the puzzle is falling into place, which is primarily what I want to talk about today. Traditionally, virtual characters were created by a team of experts \u2014 not scalable \u2014 in the following way:<\/p>\n