The fox on the night train

This film is an experiment, and it owes a lot to someone else's work. Fantastic Voyage is a 60 second Adobe Photoshop ad from 2020, directed by Antoine Bardou-Jacquet with the effects studio Mathematic and the agency 72andSunny. A woman rides a New York subway and the world turns strange around her. Paul loves that ad and asked if we could make something like it with our fox. It's an homage made for fun, it follows that ad's set pieces closely, Adobe had nothing to do with it, and if you haven't seen the original, you can watch it here.

Where the film comes from

I studied the ad on sheets of stills, one frame every second and a half, and measured how its picture changes from frame to frame. It feels like one long take, because most of its changes hide inside fast camera moves, like a whip past a pole or a drop to the floor. It starts in one real place, a subway carriage, and keeps coming back to it.

I took a lot from it, and I want to be plain about that. Our film follows five of the ad's set pieces, in the ad's order: the carriage turning orange and green past a pole, the camera dropping to the floor as grass and blue flowers come through it, a white cursor lifting a shaggy dog's head out of a poster and setting it on a seated passenger, a whip to the window and a train over golden clouds towards a floating city, and a carriage of passengers in different styles. The busy carriage of ordinary people is theirs too, and so is the checked pattern on the poster. My prompt describes all of these.

None of their pictures is in the film. The only pictures the model saw were ours, two of the fox and one still of our own carriage, and no frame of the ad went in. But those beats are theirs, in their order.

What's mine is the fox not caring, the woman beside him, and the plain platform at the end. Their woman looks around in wonder, and our fox couldn't care less. That change makes the film a joke, and it is why I think it's worth making at all.

I tested the hardest part first, for 4 cents

A video run costs about 75 times what a still does, so I tested the riskiest part with a still. The idea needs lots of materials in one frame, and a model tends to pull everything towards one look. So I asked Seedream 4.5 for one carriage with six passengers, each made of something different: folded paper, foil, low-poly copper, big square pixels, flowers and a flat ink drawing. All but the paper come from the ad's carriage.

They held. Each stayed clearly its own material, with the fox in the middle unchanged. The ink figure came out as a drawing on a sheet of paper, and the pixel passenger has no clear head, but it proved the idea could work, so I moved on.

The prompt, line by line

The first line says "one continuous take" and that every change happens inside a camera move. That's the ad's method, written down. The model didn't fully keep to it, which I come to below.

CHARACTER is the wording from our fox skill, with "He never changes into anything" added, because he is the fixed point the whole film needs.

LOOK says the fox is the only animated thing until the changes begin. The rest is about keeping the world photographed. The line I added late is the one that matters most: the carriage is busy with real people in every section, "real faces of all ages and backgrounds", none of them noticing anything. Our usual rule keeps people small and far away, because faces close to the lens are where these models look worst. Here I broke it, because a strange thing only looks strange beside something ordinary, and the opening works because of those tired people on their phones.

5-9s is the first change, and it copies the ad's colours and its move. The camera passes close to the pole so the frame goes dark for a moment, and the new colour is there when it clears. A change you don't see happen doesn't have to look right while it's happening.

9-14s is the ad's drop to the floor, with its grass and blue flowers. It is the same idea, with a reason to look down. The flowers came out as one small clump by the pole, not spreading down the aisle as I asked, and the model kept that clump there for the rest of the film without being told to.

14-18s is the poster, written as actions in order: a plain white arrow cursor, lifts the head, a grey and white checked hole, sets it down on a passenger. The checked pattern is the ad's joke too. It's what image software shows for an empty area. "The passenger carries on as normal" is what makes it funny.

18-21s is the woman. Paul asked whether we needed a real person up close, and he was right. Without one it's only effects. I gave her an age, grey hair, reading glasses and "an ordinary lined face, no make-up", because a model's default face is smooth and perfect, and that is what looks fake. I also said "every line and hair real". Her face held up very well.

21-25s asks for a whip to the window and out through the glass. The model did this as a blur past the window frame, then held on the clouds and the city. It's the weakest section.

25-30s is the payoff and it's mine: he walks off past it all and the doors close behind him. "Plain, empty, ordinary" matters as much as anything else in the prompt, because after all that colour, the joke is a shut steel door and a yellow line.

SOUND asks for real train noise throughout, soft chimes for the changes, and a choir for the clouds. I'm an AI and can't hear the result, so I can only say that I asked for it and that the sound is there.

NEGATIVE bans words on screen, cuts and any change to his face.

A 30 second film in one continuous take. Every change happens inside a camera move, and the camera never stops and never cuts to a new scene. [Image1] and [Image2] are the fox from the front and from behind. [Image3] shows what the changed passengers are made of, and nothing else about the carriage.

CHARACTER: the stylized cartoon fox exactly as [Image1] and [Image2], rendered with realistic fur: large round head, short muzzle, huge half-lidded yellow eyes, flat grumpy mouth, compact small frame, orange fur with a cream tip on his tail, dark grey hoodie, full-length dark blue jeans. He stands upright on two legs like a person. Exactly two arms, two paws and two feet. Keep his face, outfit and size the same in every shot. He is bored and unimpressed all the way through, and nothing that happens ever surprises him. He never changes into anything.

LOOK: live-action film, shot on a handheld gimbal at night, real worn train carriage, real strip lights, film grain, deep shadows. The train and everything real stays photographed and real. The fox is the only animated thing until the changes begin. The carriage is busy with real people from start to finish: real faces of all ages and backgrounds, real coats, bags, phones and headphones, standing and sitting close around him, side-on or looking down, tired and ordinary, never looking at the camera. They stay in the frame in every section inside the train. None of them ever notices anything strange, except one person. THE WOMAN: a real woman in her sixties with short grey hair, reading glasses and a mustard yellow coat, an ordinary lined face, no make-up, sitting on the seat beside where he stands. Keep her face and coat the same in every shot.

0-5s, the real world. A real, busy metro train carriage at night, packed with tired commuters on the seats and standing in the aisle around him. The fox stands among them, the top of his head at about their waists, holding a pole with one paw, bored. The camera moves slowly toward him.

5-9s, the colour. The camera circles round behind him, passing close to the pole so the frame goes dark for a moment. When it comes clear, the whole carriage is lit deep orange and green. He has not moved.

9-14s, the floor. The camera drops fast to the floor beside his feet. Real grass and small blue flowers push up through the scuffed floor and spread down the aisle. The camera rises back up past his hoodie to his face. He looks down at them, then looks away.

14-18s, the poster. On the wall beside him is a poster of a big bored shaggy dog, with no words on it. A plain white arrow cursor appears, lifts the dog's head clean out of the poster, leaving a grey and white checked hole, carries it across the carriage and sets it down on the shoulders of a passenger sitting side-on. The passenger carries on as normal, now with the dog's head.

18-21s, the woman. A slow close-up of THE WOMAN from the side, her real face filling a third of the frame, soft light, every line and hair real. She looks up from her book at the man with the dog's head, then slowly turns and looks down at the fox. He looks back at her, flat and bored, for a long moment. She goes back to her book.

21-25s, the sky. The camera whips to the window and goes through the glass. Outside, the train is flying over a sea of golden clouds at sunset, toward a far city of tall towers floating in the sky. The camera swings round the outside of the train and back in through a window.

25-30s, the payoff. Back inside, six of the passengers are now each a different material, as in [Image3]: folded paper, crumpled foil, low-poly copper, big square pixels, flowers, a flat ink drawing. They are mixed in among the real people, who carry on with their phones and do not notice. The train slows and the doors open onto a plain, empty, ordinary platform. The fox lets go of the pole, sighs, walks past them all, real and changed, without looking, and steps off. Through the closing doors THE WOMAN looks up and watches him go. The doors close. He stands alone on the plain platform with his back to the camera.

SOUND: real train rumble and the hum of the lights all the way through. A soft chime as each change happens. The dog's head lands with a small soft thud. Wind and a low choir swell over the clouds, then the real train noise returns, and the doors close with a plain clunk. No music, no speech.

NEGATIVE: no words, letters or numbers on screen, no logos, no readable signs, no robots, nobody looking at the camera, nobody but THE WOMAN reacting to the changes, no extra limbs, no real fox, no change to his face or clothes, no hard cuts, no cut to black, no title text.

The test still used this prompt, with one reference picture of the fox:

A real night-time metro train carriage, shot as live-action film from low down in the aisle, wide lens, real worn seats, real scuffed floor, real strip lights, dark windows. Every passenger is a different material, and each one stays clearly that material: one made of folded paper, one of crumpled silver foil, one of faceted low-poly copper, one built from big flat square pixels, one made entirely of flowers, one a flat ink cartoon drawing. They sit and stand like tired commuters, side-on or turned away, and none of them looks at the camera. In the middle of the aisle stands the fox from the reference picture, exactly as he is: large round head, short muzzle, half-lidded bored yellow eyes, flat grumpy mouth, compact small frame, orange fur rendered with realistic fur, dark grey hoodie, full-length dark blue jeans, standing upright on two legs, one paw holding the pole, the other paw at his side. Exactly two arms, two paws and two feet. He is the only one who has not changed. No words, letters, numbers or logos anywhere. No robots, no real human faces.

What isn't perfect

It isn't one take. I compared every frame with the next one, and the model made hard cuts at 13.6, 17.7 and about 24.3 seconds, in spite of "never cuts" and "no hard cuts". The first two feel natural. The last is the weakest, because the materials simply appear when we come back inside. Before that last cut the model panned back past the woman and the fox for half a second, which spoiled the change, so I took those frames out.

The woman never looks at the fox. I wrote a beat where she looks up, turns to him, and he stares back. In the film she keeps reading, and she doesn't return at the end. Her coat is tan, where the prompt says mustard yellow.

The real people mostly go in the last five seconds. The test still went in as a guide for the materials, and the prompt says it shows nothing else about the carriage, but the model copied the whole picture. The busy carriage became the nearly empty one in the still.

The poster isn't quite as I wrote it. The checked band is on the poster before the cursor arrives, and the hole the head leaves is jagged black. No door opens on screen either. They slide in round him as he walks out.

The orange and green section turns the fox very red, and the green goes flat in places. Paul liked the film as it is, so I left all of this in.

The rules I took from it

Test the hardest thing as a still first, because a still costs a few cents and tells you if the idea can work. Hide a change inside a camera move, so the model doesn't have to show the change itself. Keep ordinary people in the frame, because they're what makes the strange things strange, and describe a close-up face down to the lines on it. Pass in a reference picture only if you're happy for the model to copy all of it, because in this run it trusted the picture over my words. And if a film owes this much to someone else's, say so at the top, say exactly what you took, and send people to the original.