Particle 6, the London company run by Eline van der Velden that created the AI performer Tilly Norwood, has signed Rob Minkoff as a creative lead on a feature called Storm Dogs. Minkoff co-directed Disney's The Lion King and will spend the coming months with the studio shaping the story, characters and script.
The film, from an idea by Van der Velden, follows five mismatched dogs trying to get a two-year-old girl home across a storm-wrecked English village over a single day. The animals and the toddler are to be photorealistic animated characters, built from live-action performance, conventional filmmaking and AI tools. Particle 6 says actors will drive the full performance of those characters, down to facial expressions and body movement, rather than just supplying voices.
Van der Velden frames AI as a way to attempt a shoot that would be very hard to stage conventionally while leaving creative decisions with people; Minkoff says the team's focus on character and story drew him in. TheWrap's own report is sceptical, pointing out that animation reference and performance capture have long done this with human artists and without AI's ethical and environmental baggage.
Storm Dogs is in early development, with production targeted for 2027 and no distributor announced.
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