London studio Dog & Rabbit (aka Andrew Kelleher and Dave Anderson) mix stop-motion, live-action, and AI with traditional and 3D animation in the first episode of their new series of comedy shorts called Baby on Board Safety Car.

Andrew Kelleher, co-founder at Dog & Rabbit: “Professor Robert is the latest character on our Incredible Noisebox platform which aims to mix new and old animation techniques to create a short and punchy sketch show comedy. He’s a cantankerous but oddly lovable old inventor navigating the brave new world of AI with a blend of naivety and arrogant tight-fistedness.

“Dog & Rabbit are celebrating our tenth anniversary this year, and Dave and I have worked together in animation for over twenty years. So we’ve got a lot of experience with traditional methods, back to the ancient days when you had to photograph your stuff instead of generating it in Midjourney.
 

“The older production methods take longer but there will always be times where they just look and work better.”

 
“But AI art is amazingly useful and is here to stay so we incorporated it alongside more traditional methods. A couple examples of old meeting new in the film include the character Flang who is the world leader in AI art. She purposefully looks AI-generated, but her paintbrush is green-screened in traditional stop motion style because it looked best to have it move in that authentic stop frame way.

“Also, the pink remote control car looks like stop-motion but is a real-life model that was 3D scanned on an iPhone and imported into After Effects using an app called Polycam. And some of Professor Robert’s backdrops are handmade miniature sets using doll house furniture while others are generated in Midjourney and fiddled with in Photoshop. The older production methods take longer but there will always be times where they just look and work better.

“Professor Robert’s voice is an AI original but carefully prompted and manipulated to encapsulate his character similar to the way we’d direct a voice actor. Elon Musk’s voice was generated in AI using a real sample of his voice. We then typed what we wanted him to say making sure it was exaggerated and silly, not trying to be authentic.

“And Vincent Van Gogh is voiced by us and filtered through ElevenLabs to give him a more gravelly tone and studio sound. Anyone who has heard our Vincent agrees he sounds exactly 100% like the authentic Vincent Van Gogh might have – if he was born in 1980s London and wasn’t an artist.”
 
 

 
Production: Dog & Rabbit
Director/animator: Andrew Kelleher, Dave Anderson