The Making of
Mars and Siv
We sat down with Jeremy and Britton to discuss how they brought Runway into every step of their production process to make the pilot episode, “No Vacancy.” Mars and Siv is currently in pre-development.
Read the full interview below and watch a preview of episode one.
For a long time we have talked about wanting to make a cartoon in the style of the old shows we grew up with, that lends itself to an episodic nature. When we started discussing what we could pitch, we threw around a few ideas but ultimately decided to let an idea grow organically.
We knew we wanted a setting where we could get creative with the characters, so space seemed like a good starting point. Then we came up with a list of jobs the main characters would do to base the show around – we played around with a delivery worker and exterminator, but landed on detective. From there, we went through a ton of old noir movies and kept our space adventure grounded in an old-timey feel that resonated from the genre.
Most of what the pilot revolves around came from us on calls every day trying to make each other laugh, such as the ideas of a gray alien sidekick, and the city running on neon power. We wanted something where the characters could be deadly serious about the stakes, but would look funny and not need to make sense to anyone watching so the viewer could just be invested in how the characters felt about the world and each other.
Having restrictions in some way when creating a project always leads to unexpected and exciting results. 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.
Every aspect of the workflow started with traditional techniques, with our team designing and illustrating characters for each shot. 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. The result was something we were genuinely surprised by.
Both of us have experience with animation experimentation, so we knew we'd spend the first couple of weeks learning how to mix Runway's tools with multiple mediums. We knew early on that the in-between frames would be managed by Runway, so we built a creative team with experience making highly-rendered illustrations and building 3D sets that were striking and well-lit. This new workflow gave us more time to hone in on a strong style.
For about a month, we had almost our full team working together on making the different mediums live harmoniously in this weird, early-20th century version of a space station city. What came out of that was something that feels recognizable, but at the same time brand new.
The opening shot was a lot of fun for us to make in combination with AI. We built a miniature set of meteors, with a city and other small complexes scattered across them, out of foam and cardboard. We shot that with cameras, then used Image to Image generation to make the model look more like a proper city in space. Our background artist used that as a reference to create a matte painting of the final environment.
There's also a shot of our villains walking through a shipping crate under the camera, and they're silhouetted. We used Gen-4 to animate their walk, which was kind of at an awkward angle, and it worked so well. Definitely saved us time there.
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.
Gen-4 totally upgraded the AI workflow. Some shots we had previously animated with Gen-3 Alpha, we were able to improve by using Gen-4 instead, such as Mars dragging Lance into the bathroom.
Something that had excited us from the get-go was the Video to Video aspect of Runway. When we first pitched the project, Jeremy discovered that by just holding a wadded up paper towel and throwing some heavy lighting on it, we could turn it into a floating island-like asteroid.
One of our favorite shots in the beginning of the film is the slow zoom on Galaxy City. We spent a few days collecting materials and had our team build the entire city from scratch. It was entirely held together by tape, strings and wooden poles. Once it was lit and filmed, we were able to put these shots into Gen-3 Alpha, which turned our foam, cardboard and wood into a tangible city structure. After that we had our team paint a vibrant city, asteroid texture and a beautiful galactic sky over the generated image. Then, we put that image back into Runway to create a parallax zoom that made everything feel more tangible and alive.
Although they didn't make it into the final cut, we had this done to a number of sweeping inner city shots at the beginning of the film that our team worked to build, paint and light. This would have not been possible to do in our time-frame without the assistance of AI and we believe it to be one of most impressive features in Runway's arsenal.
The stop frame animation we came up with. Originally we floated it as "South Parking" the animation. This meant taking specific frames and chopping up the animations to create weird, puppet-style stop-motion animations. Once we decided that was the best way to make these animations as tight as possible, we dove in head-first, and ended up with a really interesting outcome that we are very happy with. It brought us back to a world of animation that we feel like we haven't seen since our childhood with shows like "Courage the Cowardly Dog" or "Flapjack."
We hope to see "Mars and Siv" solving more mysteries together and uncovering the deeper corruption within Galaxy City, hopefully with a network or on a streaming service. In terms of other things, we always have plans for more, and our workflow is ever-evolving. With new technology releasing everyday, we are excited to keep playing with it, and see how we can continue to combine it with our traditional methods.
Episode One is streaming now.
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