The third chapter in Karl Poyzer and Joseph Roberts’ chatty animated sci-fi comedy series Floaters takes a wry look ahead to a time when “AI is so advanced it’s no longer intelligent.”

Joseph Roberts: “After the success of Floaters and Floaters: The Big Number Two, we’re back for the inevitable 3rd installment, milking that cyber cash cow, flogging that futuristic dead horse, fondling that techno walrus. This time, we’ve done something about A.I. In fact, no AI was harmed or used during the making of the film.
 

“This third installment of Floaters faced a similar technical challenge to the first two: How do you make a 3D animated short with very little experience or computing power. Or time.”

 
Karl Poyzer: “Luckily, our characters are reasonably simple, three floating near-identical drones. This of course has its own drawbacks. One of our first hurdles was to make sure we could understand who was talking when. All the voice performances were very different and we wanted the specific voice to match the specific drone. This was a mix of design and shot choice. We did a lot of iteration to get that feeling right.

“Regarding the lack of computing power, we made a call (as we had on the previous episodes) that the backgrounds should be 2D matte paintings. This meant some of that computing power got moved to the iPad and ProCreate rather than my ailing (at the time) PC and Blender. Like with other limitations, we tried to turn this into a positive and lean into the strange feeling you get when mixing 3D and 2D.

Joseph Roberts: “The A.I. drones are voiced by the fantastic trio of Lucy Briggs-Owen (Bloodborne, Dark Souls, Civilization), Verity Henry (Coronation Street, Hebburn) and Kathryn Bond (Urban Myths, Semi-Detached), and once again, the soundscape was designed and mixed by Tom Pugh, with music from Dave Dexter and Pete “Technicolour” Rogers.”
 
 

 
Director: Karl Poyzer, Joseph Roberts
Designer/animator: Karl Poyzer
Writer: Joseph Roberts, Rowan Bancroft

Sound Designer: Tom Pugh
Music: Pete “Technicolour” Rogers, Dave Dexter
Voice: Lucy Briggs-Owen, Verity Henry, Kathryn Bond

Thanks: Joe Lawerence, Ben Putland, Nicolas Vallet, Ian Hubert