LEGS: Hybrid AI and Stop-Motion Short Film

Short Film

We'd been waiting for the right project to stretch our comedic muscles, and then Shaun Haley sent us his poem, 'LEGS'. A sharp, funny, painfully relatable take on dating apps and the anxiety spiral they tend to invite. We knew immediately.

After our hybrid production for Nestlé Compleat, combining traditional techniques with AI to achieve a stop-motion feel, this felt like a natural place to push further. Legs became an exercise in using everything: 3D modelling, illustration, frame-by-frame animation, physical model-making and AI-driven animation. Our fullest toolkit yet.

How we got there

01 Concept & Pre-production

Most of the big creative decisions happened here. Through sketching, painting and a lot of iteration, we built Shaun as a character, his needs, his anxieties, his emotional world. Then we figured out how to say all of that visually, through both character and environment.

02 World Building in 3D

Shaun's flat is Shaun. Our 3D team built the space to reflect his personality, letting the detail and composition do the storytelling so nothing needed spelling out.

03 Character

Our model-making team handcrafted puppets for Shaun, Jade and the spider. Translating our designs into physical objects gave the film a tactile, grounded quality that kept everything feeling real.

04 Image Compositing

Before any movement, each shot was built as a still, using the physical models as reference to nail the lighting, texture and composition first.

05 AI-Driven Animation

We used AI video models to animate the scenes, developing a carefully controlled prompting workflow to guide performance and timing. The technology served the process; it didn't run it.

06 Final Compositing

Traditional frame-by-frame animation and additional effects were layered into the AI-generated footage, pulling all the elements into one cohesive film.