Tilly Norwood may have divided the town and broke the Internet, but the woman behind it says she thinks AI can be all love, too.
So she’s making a talking-dog movie.
Eline van der Velden, the Holland-born, London-dwelling producer of Tilly, has been developing Storm Dogs, a hybrid live-animated family film involving a motley crew of pups helping a toddler lost in the woods get home. And she’s hired The Lion King co-director Rob Minkoff to helm it.
The film will use AI generations for the child and its wide range of canine breeds (with human voice actors) and adult actors for select live-action scenes.
“I wanted to make a film that needed to be made with AI,” van der Velden, whose Particle 6 will produce the movie, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Dogs are talking so that’s never really been possible [as convincingly] with normal animation or CGI before, and also you never want to shoot with dogs and toddlers. We’re using AI in a whole new way,” she adds. (You can see a teaser below.)
Perhaps most notable for the project is the recruitment of Minkoff, the veteran family filmmaker (he also directed the first two Stuart Little films and in 2014 was behind the well-regarded DreamWorks Animation sci-fi adventure Mr. Peabody & Sherman) —and whose involvement can’t but be seen as a coup for the AI upstarts of van der Velden and Particle 6.
“Eline pitched the idea to me and I thought ‘this is the best use-case of the technology,’” Minkoff tells THR, hastening to add that he is not involved in any way with nor does he endorse Tilly Norwood. “I’ve worked with animals and I’ve worked with children and I known how difficult it is. With animals in particular it borders on the inhuman to put them through the paces of a movie set. And now we can bring them to life in the way the story needs without any of that.”
The film’s use of an AI generation for a two-year-old is also a good use case, Minkoff says; he used human toddlers for Stuart Little and found such an effort wanting at best and often downright unfair, both to crew and child.
Getting the animals in Storm Dogs to move congruously and convincingly, Minkoff acknowledged, won’t be in easy. Dogs shot in close up have very specific features of the kind AI can struggle to match, particularly from one scene to the next. van der Velden and her team built the tool using existing models; the group is also using the veteran 3D animation software Blender to create their work.
The Particle 6 team — it also includes tech guru Filip Parulski, who says a group of new tools will “help us actually direct rather than spend time in the ‘AI casino’” — aim to show the above 2 1/2 minute proof-of- concept at select public events and to players in the industry. Minkoff estimates that developing the story and creating the right generations as well as script-polishing, editing, shooting live footage and other tasks to complete the film should take about a year — not an overnight process but also not the eons-long effort that animated and hybrid movies often require. (He is pictured below right, working on the movie.)
The film is being financed via a private donor who is behind Particle 6 and will be seeking studio distribution deeper into the process. Producers hope that Storm Dogs offers a kind of business disruption as well. Given their costs, animated family films tend to be financed and produced mainly by large studios.But AI can sufficiently reduce costs, van der Velden and Minkoff say, that it could allow for a new indie flowering in the space as well — only with technology instead of private equity and foreign pre-sales.
Minkoff says that as much as the movie could serve as a proving ground for AI in family films, he doesn’t want audiences to notice or even know how he made it.
“We are all the in the magic business; all of these tools are meant to serve an illusion,” he says. “If people are aware of the magician then they’re paying attention to the wrong thing.”
Minkoff is touching on an issue that will only become more prevalent. Hollywood likes to hide the ball under the tophat. But it doesn’t want to be engaging in rampant deepfakes either, and how to use AI without making audiences feel like they’re being misled will be among the challenges filmmakers face as they roll out AI generations more widely.
The 40-year animation and family-entertainment veteran says he does find parallels in this regard to CGI animation. “With that tech I thought the early tests were incredibly crude and a computer wasn’t going to revolutionize the animation business; people weren’t going to go for it. And now we see how that’s evolved,” he says. “I think we will see the same thing here.”
van der Velden says she’d understand why some might be skeptical of what she’s doing with Storm Dogs given the auspices but feels the finished product will help overcome those reservations.
“It’s a fun new way to tell a story that will hopefully bring a lot of joy to people,” she says. “This really is a wholesome family story that could not have been told this way before.” In general, she notes, “My husband says you can’t be doing pioneering work and expect everyone to love you, so you’ve just got to suck it up.”
Meanwhile the Tilly train rattles on. van der Velden is producing the AI-generated sci-fi feature Misaligned with the character and rolled out the generation at a press tour in September to a fair amount of attention and nearly as much backlash. The appearance had some high-profile glitches, including an appearance on Piers Morgan’s show in which it spontaneously began speaking Chinese.
But van der Velden says all of this is to be expected and furthers what she says is her true cause.
“I definitely knew it was controversial when I started making her. But I also always knew my moral compass was in the right place and that she’s not here to replace any actors,” van der Velden says, continuing, “I wanted people to know before it’s here that this is happening, this is coming. I could have written a white paper but they weren’t going to listen to me if I’d done that. So I did it in a form that was a piece of art.”
She added, “The result was what I wanted to achieve, which was awareness and people having the conversation. So the end point shows this was the right thing to do.”
Rob Minkoff (r.) working on ‘Storm Dogs’
Particle 6