EVERY PET HAS A PROBLEM.
Pet Support Group is a short comedy about the problems animals have with their humans and the meetings they apparently need to shed them.
“The idea started when the very real cat, Algebra came home from the vet with a prescription meant for a cat named ‘Booger‘. I immediately felt sympathy for this animal. Someone had looked at a perfectly good cat and decided that, for the rest of his life, he would answer to Booger.
I imagined him discussing this indignity in his own pet support group in a dark, wet alley somewhere. The others would listen, offer sympathy, and then share whatever ridiculous thing their humans had done to them.”
- Scott Barrett
The script that was born from that musing seemed like a perfect candidate to put the emerging AI tech to the test, At the time it was written though, the AI testing was truly horrific – nightmare fuel. It took two years before we could reasonably make a pet talk that wouldn’t require the viewer to find their own therapy group. But the moment our team had a truly successful test, we started casting…
COLLECT THEM ALL!
REAL UNREAL PETS
Many of the characters were based on our own pets. Algebra, Jeremy, Butter, Biscuit, Miss Geokitties, etc, all grace the homes of our crew and friends.
IMAGE TO MODEL
Based on real pictures, the pets were turned into 3D models using Tripo.
The resulting 3D models were used to populate our custom Unreal Engine 5 set. With the cast in place, we could compose shots, position the camera, and establish the staging.As cameras were set, the 3D rendered “start” frames were fed to ChatGPT to “realify” the polygonal characters into fluffy, photo realistic storyboards.
REAL ACTORS, REEL PERFORMANCES
All of the characters in Pet Support Group were voiced by humans. Mark Strohman, Kimberly Moriarty, Kerry Kirkpatrick, Josh Solis and Scott Barrett provided voices for all of the characters while ElevenLabs revised those recordings to sound like a larger cast.
In Progress...
We are working on an app/site that will provide several services to help animal shelters promote and share their available pets that are ready to be adopted. MORE TO COME on this soon!
