Short Film
Is it a one man show with GenAI?
Activity Log
My Plan (Jan 1, 2025)
1. Learn about the movie making process
The first thing I wanted to explore was how directors create movies! After searching for courses online, I found Ron Howard’s Directing course on MasterClass. You can check it out here. This course gave me a basic understanding of the film making process. The highlight, in my opinion, was Ron Howard staging a scene from Frost/Nixon. He spent hours with the crew to recreate the original scene, providing a fascinating behind-the-scenes perspective.
I also watched a few videos by Martin Scorsese on MasterClass, but I didn’t find them as helpful as Ron Howard’s course.
Currently, I’m still on the hunt for a course focused on directing animated movies, but I haven’t found anything concrete yet. If you know of any good resources, please let me know!
2. How to sketch and draw
I believe being able to convey ideas visually through storyboards is crucial. To get started, I’m learning how to draw cartoons using Cartooning 101. There’s so much to learn, and I’m actively searching for more resources. If you know any good ones, I’d love to hear your suggestions!
3. Storytelling
I’ve gone through Pixar’s The art of storytelling course on Khan Academy a few years ago. But I’m planning to revisit it to refresh my memory. I’m also looking for more resources on storytelling. If you know of any good ones, please share them with me!
4. Storyboarding
To put my new skills into practice, I’m converting a technical blog post I had in draft into a story and then a storyboard. I’ll share my progress here soon!
Where it started (Dec 19, 2024)
I am not a film enthusiast. I can’t name more than half a dozen directors, and I certainly have no idea how they look or what movies they’ve directed. But I do love two things: watching cartoons and animations, and telling stories.
For the past five years, I’ve been telling stories to Ilya every night. Well, maybe not every single night, but you get the idea. I’ve realized storytelling is an incredibly powerful way to teach kids about the world. It works far better than simply preaching about the importance of sharing or being kind. Some of the stories we’ve shared would be even better as visuals—it’s so much more engaging when we read Dog Man together!
One day, a good friend of mine approached me and shared his passion for creating an animated movie. The catch? He’s an engineer, just like me! We thought that with all these new generative AI tools, we could quickly throw together a short film. We were wrong. The current tools and models didn’t quite get us anywhere. It was a failure.
So here I am, trying again—this time, more slowly. This is meant to be a fun project where I experiment with new tools or build my own to animate a movie the way I envision it, not the way the tools dictate. I don’t know how long this will take, but I know it will be fun. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it, but I know I’ll learn a lot.