Created in part with the company’s AI tools, the series from directors Jeremy Higgins and Britton Korbel is set in Galaxy City, where disgraced P.I. Mars O’Maley is forced to team up with SIV, an oddball rookie with a lab-made mind.
Runway Studios has released “No Vacancy,” the pilot episode from the upcoming animated series Mars and Siv, created in part with Runway AI tools. Jeremy Higgins and Britton Korbel direct.
The series is set in Galaxy City, where disgraced P.I. Mars O’Maley is forced to team up with SIV, an oddball rookie with a lab-made mind. As they take on bizarre cases from cheating cultist spouses to underworld turf wars, their unlikely partnership is tested at every turn.
“The process of introducing Runway into our typical animation pipeline was interesting, because we had a lot of success in our early tests, but when we got deeper into real production we started to run into many different challenges,” said Higgins and Korbel in a joint statement.
“Every aspect of the workflow started with traditional techniques, with our team designing and illustrating characters for each shot,” the duo continued. “We had a 3D artist who modeled basically every environment for us, aside from the ones we modeled by hand or had matte painted. Everything was made by a person. We then input the assets into Runway to be moved and animated in different ways. What we got from Runway were great animations that served as a base – from there, we basically reverse-animated those renders by taking specific in-between frames and creating brand-new 2D stop-motion animations out of them.”
Speaking on Runway’s AI creation process, the directors said, “Something we found out early in the process was that there's an uncontrollable element trusting AI with the animation no matter how much you plan out a shot. The fact that this film was based off of the noir genre let us lean into building all of our shots around heavy lighting, minimal movement and highly rendered illustrations. The blending of those elements with AI came in the form of using After Effects to take those animated characters and perfectly sync them vocally and movement wise.”
Check out “No Vacancy” now; you can learn more about the production here:
Source: Runway Studios
Journalist, antique shop owner, aspiring gemologist—L'Wren brings a diverse perspective to animation, where every frame reflects her varied passions.
