Keep the gesture.
Use the filmed movement as the foundation while giving the image a new visual treatment.
Red Sky PerformanceA film by Sandra Laronde2023 — 2024
An ancient story. An emerging medium.
Land
Dances Us
Real bodies. Imagined worlds.
Bringing an Anishinaabe creation story into the early days of AI filmmaking.
Written, directed & choreographed bySandra Laronde
Our partAI lead & creative collaborator
MediumPerformance + AI animation
Released2024 · Aki Creators
01The story
The world begins
with a fall.
A woman falls through a hole in the sky. She arrives on Earth with a few seeds in her hand, and discovers that her fate is bound to the trees.
For Land Dances Us, Sandra Laronde, artistic director of Red Sky Performance, brought an Anishinaabe creation story into a new visual world. Dance and aerial performance would carry the story. AI would help shape the world around them.
We joined Sandra as AI lead and creative collaborator. Starting in 2023, we built the workflows to transform filmed performances into animated imagery, at a moment when AI video was still finding its feet.
The story at Red Sky Performance ↗02The trailer
A glimpse of
another world.
Land Dances Us
Original release trailer · 1 min 18 sec
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The original trailer, including its May 2024 launch announcement.
Watch the full film on Aki Creators ↗Read the trailer’s visual story
A woman appears against a luminous sky, then falls through darkness and light into water. She moves underwater, surfaces, and dances across open land and through a forest. The images turn to rain, burning trees and an industrial landscape. She holds her hands together, and the view rises toward a canopy of trees and stars.
The title appears, followed by Aki Creators, Red Sky Performance and Canada Council for the Arts credits. The final card announces an exclusive release on Aki Creators in May 2024. That card is part of the original trailer; the film is now available.
This is a summary of the trailer’s visible action and end cards.
03The performance
It started
with a body.
The movement began on set. Dancers and aerialists performed against green screen, giving us the physical foundation for the animation: weight, gesture, timing and the feeling of a body moving through space.
Our work was to carry those performances into Sandra’s imagined worlds. The choreography gave the images their rhythm.
04The craft · 2023–2024
Before it
looked easy.
The tools were young. The work was immense.
We built complex workflows in ComfyUI to stylize the live-action footage. Control over the image, the rendering process and the resolution of the output were all constraints we had to work through.
Getting a compelling image was one part of the job. Carrying a performance through a moving sequence took a different level of care. The workflow itself became a substantial part of the production.
Looking back, the distance is striking. Tasks that demanded elaborate setups then have become much more accessible. This film carries the effort of that earlier moment, when we were building the process as we made the work.
Build the process.
Connect the stages in ComfyUI and work through the limitations of early AI video.
Make it hold up.
Work within the available image quality while developing a finish for the screen.
05Inside the imagery
One performance.
Many worlds.
Selected frames from the trailer.
Follow the movement from sky to land.
06Out in the world
A new home
for old stories.
Released in 2024, Land Dances Us became Red Sky Performance’s first short film. It premiered on Aki Creators, where the full film is exclusively available.
Founded by Sandra Laronde, Aki Creators brings Indigenous films, performances and conversations together around art, wisdom and land. The film belongs within that wider body of Indigenous storytelling.
Made together
The people
behind the film.
- Writer, director & choreographer
- Sandra Laronde
- Production
- Red Sky Performance
- AI lead & creative collaborator
- Dré Labre / Never
- Director of photography
- Jason George
- Music
- Eliot Britton
- Costume design
- Lesley Hampton