Toy fabric

Inspiration

We wanted to tell a modern fairytale that balances warmth and unease — a story where abandoned places hold memories and machines quietly take over. Classic stop-motion horror, Tim Burton’s worlds, and European industrial fairy tales inspired the atmosphere and tone.

What it does

Toy Fabric is an AI-animated short film where every frame blends handcrafted composition with neural generation. It follows a boy and his father as they discover an abandoned toy factory — a place where toys are not what they seem. The story slowly shifts from nostalgia to quiet horror.

How we built it

The film was created through a multi-stage AI pipeline: • Weavy for workflow orchestration • Midjourney for concept art, characters, and locations • Nano Banana for camera angles and scene composition • Kling 2.5 and Veo 3.1 for animation • After Effects for final compositing • Udio and Kling for sound design and music.

Challenges we ran into

Balancing artistic vision with neural tool limitations was the biggest challenge. Maintaining consistent character design, precise camera geography, and matching emotional tone between stylized flashbacks and the dark main timeline required extensive iteration and careful prompt engineering.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We built a full, production-level AI animation workflow from concept to final composite. The film preserves directorial control while embracing neural aesthetics — resulting in a visually rich and emotionally layered short.

What we learned

We learned how to merge traditional cinematic language with generative tools effectively. Controlling composition, camera work, and story pacing through prompts and structured pipelines allowed us to keep creative authorship while pushing the medium forward.

What’s next for Toy Fabric

We plan to expand Toy Fabric into a larger AI-animated anthology — exploring new chapters of this mechanical fairytale world. Next steps include refining the pipeline for character continuity, adding more dynamic soundscapes, and preparing the project for festival distribution.

Built With

• after
• characters
• kling
• midjourney
• nano
• udio
• veo