The Song of Drifters
This is a documentary animation film that focuses on young people who are constantly moving and unable to settle anywhere. Through voice clips from eight interviewees and visual imagery, the film explores their understanding of belonging, the concept of home, and the contradictions and acceptance they experience while unable to stop drifting.
ComfyUI, live action, blender
This film is still in proudction
Behind the Scene
This project extensively pushed the boundary of making images in various technologies. To explore how to extend my creativity through AI, rather than letting it take my creativity, I customized my generative workflow in ComfyUI and used my own illustrations as the style guide. The base video materials are live-action shooting and 3D animation in Blender by myself. The hybrid pipeline boosted the efficiency of rendering the final look and saved more time for ideation.
Rough 3D animation + AI morphing
This workflow experiments with the combination of 3D animation and AI-generated morphing. It started with more abstract expression in 3D to grasp the feeling of the interviewee’s dream, then guided with more representative illustrations and prompts. The morphing between the abstract and concrete images mimicked the experience of a half-awake dream.
Process Breakdown
The base video is a 3D animation rendered from Blender Cycles.
I converted it to three different passes in After Effects: fade in&out, mask, and depth. Each controls the timing of the morph, divides the areas between abstract and concrete visuals, and maintains the shape of the base animation separately.
I created a series of illustrations to express my impression of the dream. They landed on floral elements and ocean waves. Making these illustrations was a conversation with the big model. I tested different images, even groups of images, in the workflow. Throughout this process, when I optimized the final output, I also created a series of illustrations with the same theme and expanded my style guide archive.
