Christian Darkin has been creating digital video effects for the last 25 years as the head of Anachronistic Animation, producing a wide range of work for TV and film. He was the head animator on the first series of the BBC’s broadcast nominated show, Magic Hands, and the head of VFX on Raindance nominated Sci-Fi feature, The Quiet Hour.Christian learned coding on the 1K ZX81 and since artificial intelligence became a thing, he’s been emersed in finding new ways to use it in production and beyond. He’s worked extensively with Large language models, image and video creation pipelines, deepfake technology and audio AIs developing and coding novel ways to combine new technologies, and even training his own custom models from scratch. He created the deepfakes for Gerry Anderson, A Life Uncharted, and works with other production companies on their approach to using the new technology in an ethical way in a range of shows. He’s also part of Reading University’s Synthetic Media Research Group.In his other creative work, Christian has written on technology subjects for The Times, The Guardian, The FT and dozens of newstand magazines. He has written 14 books - ranging from textbooks for After Effects through to young adult novels and the bestselling “Act Normal” series of children’s chapter books. He regularly visits schools to talk about writing, animation and AI.