Atlas Shrugged: A Book Trailer for Ayn Rand's Masterpiece
Atlas Shrugged: A Book Trailer for Ayn Rand's Masterpiece
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Animation
This short film is an AI anime trailer for Ayn Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged. From the perspective of Dagny Taggart, female railroad executive and the main protagonist of the novel, we see a world crumbling around her as she embarks on a mission to find the man behind the destruction... and stop him. The film features all the major characters from the book and serves to introduce audience members to the classic work that many call Ayn Rand's masterpiece.
AI was used to transform human actors shot on a greenscreen into anime characters. First, we trained the AI on the artistic style of the film, using it to establish a consistent look and feel. Then we shot live actor performances on greenscreen. The footage was then put through several different AI processes to render that performance in anime form. In a more fundamental sense, the AI process affected the conception of the project, the writing, and the storyboarding by the production team, because without it, our approach and the end result would have been entirely different. We used a lot of camera movements typical in liveaction (handheld, dolly moves), but rarely used in traditional anime.