In this film, a group of art students experience a metaversal encounter with French post impressionist painter Henri Rousseau’s 1908 work, Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo. We follow these friends through a museum to the piece, where upon admiring the naïve, two-dimensional qualities of the painting, a new three-dimensional animated reality reveals itself, complete with jungle flora and fauna in Rousseau’s painterly style dancing along to a rave soundtrack.

Facebook changed the way we communicate online. But the metaverse is widely considered the next evolution of the Internet. As Facebook prepared to rebrand to Meta, they set out to change the Internet again, hoping to become the industry leader in the developing metaverse. This moment signaled a massive shift in the way we interact online, as two dimensions prepare to become three. To accompany this sudden and seismic rebrand, Facebook needed a way to introduce audiences to the new name and concept surrounding this next evolution of social connection.

A blend of puppetry, CG and AI-generated flora and fauna were used to create a 3D reality. Each puppet was carefully designed by the creature creator for 'Where the Wild Things Are', then brought to life using a combination of green screen, classic puppetry and procedurally generated CG and AI technology. We developed a unique AI workflow that drew on Rousseau's original paintings as source information for machine learning. The result? Live-action puppets treated with AI to render them in the style of Rousseau. A Python script generated source material for the AI aggregate and learned what Henri Rousseau’s painting style looked like. As the AI gathered more source material, it was able to take footage and graft Rousseau’s painterly style onto it. We told the computer to “make like Rousseau”, and the AI translated and rendered the footage to create a recognizably Rosseau result across plants, puppets and vegetation.