Rob Minkoff / Particle 6 / Storm Dogs · September 25, 2026
Rob Minkoff Joins Storm Dogs, a Performance-Driven AI Feature Built Around Actors
TheWrap · News Article
What happened
Rob Minkoff is joining Particle 6 as creative lead on the family feature Storm Dogs, working with Eline van der Velden on the story, characters and screenplay ahead of a planned 2027 production. Human roles are intended to be photographed conventionally, while five dogs and a two-year-old character would be photorealistic animated characters created through a combination of live-action performance, traditional filmmaking and emerging AI techniques. The proposed performance-driven pipeline has actors physically perform the characters — not merely provide voices — with facial expression, timing, body movement and emotional choices translated into the animated characters, down to details such as a dog's ears or tail. Particle 6 says the aim is to preserve actor-driven performance while avoiding the safety and logistics problems of putting a toddler and multiple dogs through extreme-weather sequences. The film is still in development: there is no finished footage or published technical breakdown yet, so these are intended production methods, not a proven pipeline.
Why it matters
This is a potentially meaningful middle ground between traditional performance capture and fully synthetic characters. The proposed workflow starts with an actor, a director and an intentional performance, then uses machine learning further down the chain to transform that performance into a difficult-to-photograph character. That is materially different from prompting a model to invent the performance from scratch.
Antique Robots take
This is the distinction we care about. Don't ask AI to invent the performance — direct an actor. Let an actor decide when the character hesitates, looks away, flinches or becomes afraid. If AI can then translate that performance into a photoreal dog crossing a flooded bridge without putting animals or a toddler in danger, that's a legitimate production problem worth solving. But right now this is still a proposed workflow. The real test will come when we can see what survives from the actor through the pipeline, and how much control filmmakers retain once shots enter production.