With no way to film during COVID lockdown, I combined traditional animation techniques and machine learning to bring director Quincy Ledbetter’s vision to life.
Our cast of professional actors filmed themselves in their own homes (or in one case in a busy Chicago park). Inspired by the techniques used to create the Amazon show Undone, I built 3D sets that Quincy’s could direct. The finished plates were given to painters to render in gouache.
I was going to rotoscope the footage by hand, but we were lucky to find the team at Cartoonizer who allowed us to use their product to process every frame with a style replacement AI. Before the footage could be sent through the machine learning algorithm I painstakingly roto-brushed out the actors, cleaned up stray hairs, and removed lavalier mic cords by hand – a process that took four months. I composited the processed footage over the painted frames in After Effects, adding effects and color correction to create the finished look.
The resulting seven-minute short has gone on to appear in more than eleven film festivals, including the Vancouver International Film Festival, Urbanworld, and Woodstock. It has garnered several awards in the process. It is distributed by AfroPop, and available through their channel on YouTube.
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