Google DeepMind just premiered something unprecedented at the Sundance Film Festival - an animated short film created through a radical collaboration between traditional animators and AI researchers. "Dear Upstairs Neighbors," screening at Sundance's Story Forum today, represents a new frontier in creative AI tooling, where fine-tuned video models work alongside hand-crafted animation rather than replacing it. The project reveals how Google's Veo AI can learn unique artistic styles and respond to visual direction, not just text prompts.
Google DeepMind just crashed Sundance with a wildly ambitious experiment. The animated short "Dear Upstairs Neighbors" premiered today at the festival's Story Forum, but it's not the charming story of a sleep-deprived woman battling noisy neighbors that has people talking - it's how the damn thing got made.
Director Connie He, a Pixar alum, teamed up with Google's AI researchers to create something that shouldn't quite exist yet: a hand-crafted animated film where AI does the heavy lifting on the most technically brutal parts, while human artists maintain frame-by-frame creative control. The result challenges basically everything we thought we knew about AI's role in creative work.
"The expressionistic visual styles are central to the storytelling - and extremely difficult to achieve in traditional animation," supervising animator Cassidy Curtis explained in Google's announcement. The team discovered early on that their vision was so specific, their styles so unique, that existing AI tools couldn't cut it. So they built new ones.
Here's where it gets interesting. The production team fine-tuned custom versions of Veo and Imagen - Google's video and image generation models - by feeding them artwork from production designer Yingzong Xin. But this wasn't simple style transfer. The AI learned deep artistic concepts like two-point perspective and how to maintain character silhouettes that follow 2D animation rules even as forms rotate in 3D space.
