How to Turn Your Live-Action Short Into a Stylized Rotoscope-Animated Film
GIANTS started as a three-day live-action shoot in Austin, Texas, back in 2013 - complete with a greenscreen soundstage, a day in the woods, and a sizable crew assembled through crowdfunding and favors. Filmmaker Nate Bayless had the concept arrive fully formed, drawing on influences ranging from Studio Ghibli and Ralph Bakshi's rotoscope films to dystopian fiction like The Matrix and Brave New World. The footage looked solid, shot on a Blackmagic 4K Cinema Camera by DP Dustin Supencheck, but Bayless had overestimated his own VFX capabilities at the time and chose to shelve post-production rather than compromise the film.
The turn toward animation came around two years later, when Bayless began working with Austin rotoscope studio Minnow Mountain and recognized the format as the right path forward. Even then, the project stalled repeatedly - no visual style felt correct, fatherhood arrived in 2020, and years passed. It was only after a successful festival run for his short Shirime in 2024 that Bayless returned to GIANTS with renewed focus. The story itself remained largely intact from the original script, but the shift to animation opened up possibilities that live-action could never have afforded. What was originally a monolithic building became a lumbering, decayed giant with a machine head - a change Bayless credits with producing a stronger ending that fits the film's themes more precisely.
Rotoscoping occupies an interesting position in independent filmmaking. It requires live-action reference footage, which means the energy and unpredictability of a real set, but the subsequent drawing process allows a filmmaker to redesign sets, wardrobe, and environments without the associated production costs. Bayless describes the medium as feeling like "being in a dream" - sitting at the boundary between the real and the constructed in a way that suits the nature of cinema itself. For a low-budget independent project with heavy visual ambitions, the approach offered a practical route to a world that straight live-action could not have built affordably.
For filmmakers considering a similar path, Bayless frames long-term persistence less as stubbornness and more as following the projects that refuse to let go. His broader advice centers on craft, genuine relationships over networking transactions, and showing up consistently within filmmaking communities. The decade-plus timeline of GIANTS is, in his telling, not a cautionary tale but simply what it took to get the film right.
