Conference Designing Spaces Shorts
ON SITE Meidinger-Saal Tuesday, May 05, 15:45

The Making of "Dear Upstairs Neighbors"

Join the team behind the animated short "Dear Upstairs Neighbors" for a screening and deep dive into new, artist-centered, AI-assisted animation workflows. This film blends traditional animation with abstract expressionism using innovative video-to-video techniques, transforming hand-crafted art into "living paintings". Learn how animation veterans and researchers at Google DeepMind developed and used custom AI models to expand artistic possibilities while maintaining total creative control.

 

Connie He

Connie He, Director, Google DeepMind

Connie He is an animation director and creative technologist at Google DeepMind. Her professional background includes work on animated feature films like Inside Out 2 and Dream Productions at Pixar from 2021-2024, while her first short film, "Watermelon: A Cautionary Tale,” is a viral success with over 200 million views on YouTube.

Sarah Rumbley

Sarah Rumbley, VFX Supervisor, Google DeepMind

Sarah Rumbley is a software engineer at Google DeepMind, and served as VFX Supervisor for Dear Upstairs Neighbors. Drawing on her background in photography, she is passionate about bringing a creator’s perspective to her work on image and video generation. Her first love was music, and she remains an active performer as a classical pianist in the Fireside Ensemble (a Boston-based chamber music group) and bass guitarist in her office rock band (“Codeplay”), while also pursuing studies in composition and film scoring.

Cassidy Curtis

Cassidy Curtis, Supervising Animator, Google DeepMind

Cassidy Curtis (supervising animator for “Dear Upstairs Neighbors”) can usually be found at the intersection of animation and experimental technology. His career has spanned the rise of computer graphics in the ‘90s, the dawn of non-photorealistic rendering, and the immersive storytelling wave of the late ‘10s. He has won VES awards for his work as a character animator (Toothless in “How to Train Your Dragon”) and look developer (“Age of Sail”). His mission is to help artists and technologists understand each other and do things together that they couldn’t possibly do alone.