As I am creating artworks professionally for two decades my intention was to create all parts of this short film by myself, but I have made some unfortunate decisions with starting to develop the film in two software – Unreal and Blender.
This led to technical difficulties that I could not solve despite my best efforts, even after months of experimenting.

I decided to move forward with the tools I can actually use and also try an alternate path with assistive AI, using it for the integration of my hero characters into my final modeled and lit scenes. This resulted in months of editing my final renders, as I had to realize that the use of AI is extremely difficult if I know the exact outcome I would like to see.
Unfortunately the film still has some errors and glitches in movement / animation, what I could not solve…
Despite the sometimes painful work I could focus on my creative process again instead of trying to solve technical issues. At the end I created all animations and extra FX with the help of Adobe Firefly inside Photoshop and Kling AI.

Would have it been possible to create the same thing with real artists? Yes.
Would the final result have been better done by real artists? Absolutely. No question about that.
Why did I do it then? Two reasons:
1. As an Art / Creative Director working a lot in CG animation I have immense respect for the animators and FX artists doing this type of work and I am fully aware of their dedication and talent. I had to accept that my knowledge is nowhere close to what I would need. These are separate professions, which need years, if not decades, to master.
So I wanted to focus on the storytelling instead.
2. I was aware that I would require a full team of professionals to complete the tasks I needed and unfortunately I did not have the budget to hire these talents. I am aware of the industry rates and I did not want people working on my passion project for free, for “exposure” or for insultingly low rates.

I handle the process of this film as an experiment with the currently available tools of our industry and after working with them for months I can clearly see their downsides and upsides. I am not interested in using AI to replace any part of my creative process and I would still prefer working with real humans for every and any aspect of a CG production. But I also firmly believe that assistive AI can be a really powerful tool in the hands of trained CG professionals and it can help them to elevate their work to higher levels.

I am fully aware of the environmental impact of this and I did my best to track my carbon footprint my AI usage caused throughout the project . Currently I am looking into supporting high impact climate projects to negate this.

AI is not good or evil, it only depends on us how we use it.

-mark