The Professor
Blue beanie, round glasses, a physics formula on his T-shirt. Explains the future until it dissolves around him.
When Everything Crumbles
A professor promises that AI will fix everything. Then the university crumbles into dust.
The Data Science Lab of the University of Bern supports researchers across the university in data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence. It asked for a short film that makes people smile and still says clearly what the lab does. The film is the third part of a trilogy the lab began years ago.
A frog puppet modelled on the lab’s director sits in his office and explains how nanobots will soon build anything atom by atom, and how scarcity, decay and instability will simply vanish. Mid-sentence the picture starts to glitch. The office falls apart, and outside, the main building of the university turns to dust.
In the rubble, two puppets hammer at an old computer and try to put the world back together. Almost. At the end the director himself stands in front of the university, his puppet in his hand. That image is generated too, from photographs of him and with his consent.
A real building, generated puppets and a dust storm in between.
1real location, the main building
3puppets
1motion actor
3parts of the trilogy
20sheets and plates
The university is real. The main building was photographed with a drone and became the plate for the exterior shots, so the film plays in a place everyone in Bern knows. The puppets were built as character sheets and generated into the scenes.
Their movement comes from people: a motion actor played the frog’s gestures in front of a camera, and the performance was transferred to the puppet. The director’s voice was cloned with ElevenLabs from his own recordings, the bear got a designed voice. The building turns to dust in two layers, a generated dissolve finished with real dust particles in Fusion.
By people
- Idea and screenplay
- Direction and prompting
- Motion performance
- Edit, colour and compositing
- Music and sound design
Tools
- Puppets, frames and videoHiggsfield
- Exterior platesDJI Mini 4 Pro
- VoicesElevenLabs
- Particles and compositingFusion
- Edit and gradeDaVinci Resolve
- MusicLogic Pro
The Bear
Polka-dot tie, an old computer in the grass. Tries to bring the world back, one key at a time.
The Pink Puppet
Wants only one thing back: the coffee machine.
Every shot started as a sheet.
The three puppets, the computer, the office and the university, each built once so it looks the same in every shot. Turn the sphere, open one, read the start of the prompt behind it.
Planning a film like this?
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Commissioned by the Data Science Lab of the University of Bern. The puppets, the dissolve, the voices and the director in the final shot are made with generative AI; his likeness and his voice are used with his consent. The exterior plates are real drone photographs. Idea, direction, motion performance, edit and music are made by people.