{"id":56344,"date":"2026-05-30T18:37:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T18:37:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/56344\/"},"modified":"2026-05-30T18:37:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T18:37:17","slug":"dustin-yellins-goodnight-lamby-brings-gen-ai-to-cannes-classics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/56344\/","title":{"rendered":"Dustin Yellin’s ‘Goodnight Lamby’ Brings Gen-AI to Cannes Classics"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year\u2019s eclectic Cannes<\/a> Classics lineup brought 4K restorations of Guillermo del Toro\u2019s \u201cPan\u2019s Labyrinth\u201d and Ken Russell\u2019s \u201cThe Devils<\/a>,\u201d documentaries about Bruce Dern and Vittorio de Sica, and historian\/filmmaker Mark Cousins\u2019 latest installment of \u201cStory of Film<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n

Tucked in the lineup alongside shorts from Chinese auteur Jia Zhang-ke and Iranian photographer Amirhossein Shojaei was a new 15-minute film from Brooklyn mixed media artist and Pioneer Works founder Dustin Yellin<\/a> \u2014 produced by Darren Aronofsky\u2019s creative studio Primordial Soup, with cinematography from Oscar nominee Matthew Libatique, and starring Paul Rudd and the voice of Chris Rock. <\/p>\n

\"Spark<\/a> \"NEW<\/a> <\/p>\n

The burstingly creative and joyous \u201cGoodnight Lamby<\/a>,\u201d which stars Yellin\u2019s daughter Zia as a version of herself who journeys inside one of her father\u2019s sculptures in search of her missing stuffed animal, is produced by Aronofsky with his producing partner Justin A. Gon\u00e7alves (\u201cCaught Stealing\u201d).<\/p>\n

Ricardo Villavicencio serves as head animator on a project that incorporates live action, photography, collage-like animation, and generative AI using Google Veo 3. Aronofsky has increasingly turned to the technology as a storytelling tool through his collaborations with Google DeepMind<\/a>. Now, artist Yellin sees it as a natural extension of the \u201cmultimodal\u201d storytelling of his own work, specifically the glass sculptural collage Politics of Eternity, which is here reimagined as a sprawling topography. Villavicencio Studio and 100 Zeros also produce the short.<\/p>\n

The film even includes an acoustic end credits song by Maggie Rogers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI make these sculptures that are very narrative, allegorical, with multimodal story devices with many narratives happening simultaneously, and I\u2019ve always wanted to bring them to life,\u201d Yellin said. \u201cI describe the sculptures as frozen cinema, and so it\u2019s a natural progression. It\u2019s something I\u2019ve been thinking about for years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy interest in that hypothetical scenario was doing a kaleidoscope of aesthetics, and in this case, we got to really dig deep into Dustin\u2019s personal aesthetic for Politics of Eternity\u2026 it felt serendipitous from the jump because of that,\u201d Gon\u00e7alves added.<\/p>\n

Aronofsky has increasingly become one of the vanguard filmmakers most willing to experiment with Gen-AI \u2014 sometimes controversially, such as collaborating with Google\u2019s DeepMind<\/a> AI division on the ill-received \u201cOn This Day\u20261776\u201d portrait of the Revolutionary War. But \u201cGoodnight Lamby\u201d offered a chance to wed these new tools to actual works of art. <\/p>\n

That Cannes Classics programmed the film this year alongside repertory screenings of beloved movies as well as documentaries about filmmaking suggests this section (and the festival overall) is looking to embrace new technologies and modes of storytelling alongside the medium\u2019s century-old methods.<\/p>\n

Per the animation style, which expands on the worlds of Yellin\u2019s sculptural work to create a vast undersea landscape, Villavicencio said that using Google Veo 3, \u201cwe prompt each of the elements to be animated, isolated with a green background, and then we rotoscope and compose everything digitally.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I talked to Darren about bringing my art to life over the last few years, he would [say] story, story, story, story, and I\u2019d be like, world, world, world, because I see visually and I think visually\u2026 so the whole time, from when I wrote the thing, he was there coaching me, as was Justin, because they come from the world of movies and I come from the world of making these images,\u201d said Yellin, who called upon Paul Rudd to play a version of him in the film and Chris Rock to voice a talking octopus that guides Zia Yellin on her journey.<\/p>\n

\"'Goodnight\u2018Goodnight Lamby\u2019Cannes Classics<\/p>\n

Yellin added, \u201cThese new tools helped me because I couldn\u2019t really afford it because the imagery is very, very dense and very, very analog that I work from, and it would just take me 10 years to make\u2026 This is something I\u2019ve wanted to do, and when I look at my sculptures, they\u2019re frozen cinema, but in my mind\u2019s eye, they\u2019re moving, so I see it, and it\u2019s like a little kid who\u2019s like imagining things. I\u2019m imagining the water moving, and the characters walking, and the clouds moving.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obviously, gen-AI films are under scrutiny by artists and audiences alike<\/a> right now. What\u2019s Yellin\u2019s response to that in turning the technology to realize his vision?<\/p>\n

\u201cGenerally, you walk into an art fair, you see mostly bad art, right? Good art might be made with stone or metal or acrylic or oil or whatever medium, but really it\u2019s the idea and the vision that\u2019s gonna make it good, and so I think that with these tools you\u2019re gonna see so much garbage, but you also see so much garbage in the analog world, right? The world is made of a lot of bad art,\u201d Yellin said. \u201cIt\u2019s like when anyone asks me, \u2018What kind of artist are you?\u2019 And they\u2019re like, \u2018Do you paint?\u2019 I\u2019m medium agnostic. I\u2019m working across so many different materials\u2026 it\u2019s not the what you\u2019re seeing but the how you\u2019re seeing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The plan for now is to continue exhibiting \u201cGoodnight Lamby\u201d at festivals with the hope of eventually touring it through museums.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the film allows us to introduce technology to a lot of different communities in the art world, not just film,\u201d Gon\u00e7alves added. \u201cI\u2019ll be curious to see how the piece is received alongside the sculpture in those different spaces. I mean, the quality is undeniable, in my opinion\u2026 One of the things that I\u2019m most grateful for about this experience is working with an artist like Dustin, who has such a refined eye, but in a lot of ways, it\u2019s a first-time director, so there\u2019s an active discovery alongside his experience that has made the process really unique.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This year\u2019s eclectic Cannes Classics lineup brought 4K restorations of Guillermo del Toro\u2019s \u201cPan\u2019s Labyrinth\u201d and Ken Russell\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56345,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[24,11163,32865,3253,32866,132,1429,6561],"class_list":["post-56344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-google","tag-ai","tag-cannes","tag-dustin-yellin","tag-film","tag-goodnight-lamby","tag-google","tag-google-ai","tag-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56344\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}