Texas Producer
The idea behind a new short film using artificial intelligence created by the local production company, Texas Producer, began with a vivid dream, literally. After waking up in a cold sweat from what he describes as a fever dream, “Bottoms UP!” director Brandon Schwindt says he was inspired to try and create the visual elements he just experienced in a film format.
“The idea refused to fade and persisted in my thoughts,” Schwindt says. “This led to the exciting challenge of finding the best medium to tell the story with either live action, traditional animation, 3D, or stop motion.”
The first step in trying to tackle this idea was to present it to Schwindt’s business partner, executive producer Clayton Coblentz. Last year, this duo of Fort Worth-based auteurs took home the top prize for their video “Collective Effervescence” at the 2023 Lone Star Emmy Awards in Houston. This along with several other accolades, has given this local production team a bit of a hitch in their giddy up. Another aspect that has these two film buffs smiling is the “proof of concept” their latest project conveys; the use of AI to create another dimension.
In a nutshell, “Bottoms Up!” is a 20-minute film that follows Amelia, a world-weary proctologist, who along with her dog, inadvertently discovers a portal to another dimension, where the two become separated. Amelia soon finds herself lost in an AI-assisted rotoscope realm of classic-television-themed vignettes and eccentric characters. She then embarks on a whimsical quest to reunite with her beloved pet and escape this bizarre world.
Texas Producer
“April is when we kind of went into pre-production on the film,” Schwindt says. “This is when we really kind of bit the bullet, started writing the scripts, and doing the research to create this type of short, with all the AI stuff.”
Schwindt says a lot of research went into figuring out the process, finding what works, and what didn’t.
“During this time, AI-animation techniques were making waves online,” he says. “Rather than settling for the ever-present and inconsistent, acid-trip styles running amuck, I dedicated months to researching how to craft a distinctive, custom-style based on my own artwork. I developed a workflow that leveraged AI as a supportive tool in the filmmaking process, rather than a replacement.”
Clayton Coblentz
The result offers a new complementary option for filmmakers, especially indie filmmakers to explore since this style of filmmaking is much cheaper.
“We went through the process, we spent money to produce it, but to do the animation, it would've probably been cost prohibitive for us to hire a team of people to animate it,” Coblentz says. “And so it made it more accessible for people like us to actually get into it and be able to develop and see where the technology was and how we could apply it to what we wanted to do with this film.”
Although this film has a runtime of 20 minutes, it took the Texas Producer team nearly a year to complete. “Bottoms Up!” began production last fall, after the scripts were completed.
“We did about four- or five-days total shooting,” Coblentz says. “Two of those days were on a green screen in Lowtown Studios, and then we had two and a half to three location days that we shot the rest of it on.”
More than two-dozen local actors and crew members were hired throughout the making of the film.
After everything was shot, Schwindt spent over two months taking the live scenes and running them through Stability AI’s SD 1.5 model with a custom workflow in Comfy UI to generate animation based on hand drawings fed to the platform. When Schwindt and Coblentz were satisfied with the art, the rest of the film was cut on Adobe Premiere.
Brandon Schwindt
“Although we finished the film out in Premier, we had to cut everything together,” Schwindt says. “So, the pacing, the timing, and a lot of that is just the rough cut of actors on green screen, with no backgrounds. I mean, I laughed because I watched a documentary about the original ‘Tron’ and they pretty much had a very similar way of making it. They were just on black backgrounds, black screens, and the actors, they would interview them, be like, ‘What was it like?’ And they were like, ‘We had no clue. We're just pretending. We don't know what's around us. We're just in an outfit. There's nothing around us.’ It was a very similar thing that we did with our actors of like, okay, so this is here, and this is over there.”
Since completing the film, Texas Producer has already screened “Bottoms Up!” in Poland where it received Best Short with AI at Cine Tech Future Fest over the summer. This short film will make is North American premiere at the Studio City Internatinal Film Festival in Los Angeles on September 5. But us North Texans will get a sneak peek of the film ahead of time. The first screening of this film takes place tomorrow on August 28 at the Texas Theater with another screening happening at Tulips on September 17.
When asked if this new AI tech is just a fad, Schwindt says he’s already seen a huge shift in the industry towards using it due to cost.
“I don't think it's replacing anything,” he says. “It's just adding to it. It's just another paintbrush that people can pick up that's a little less cost prohibitive to be able to get into the game and try it out. I'm super excited to see where it goes, and I hope it's not just a fad. I think I would like to see it used more as the tool that it can be to be integrated into production so that it does stick around. It's just another thing to help productions get off the ground to do something they never could afford to do or was too cost prohibitive in the budgets to be able to do. Now it can help. These stories can help different stories come to life.”
