Editor's Notes:
Wyz is a motion alchemist: part designer, part sound hacker, full-time tech tinkerer, who splices AI workflows into classic animation pipelines. A good friend of the house, he dropped into OFFF's 25th-anniversary bash to bottle the festival's voltage for us. He shared these personal notes with all of us:
Heads-up: the Zoom recorder with our chat walked off in the Catalan night, so what you're reading is rebuilt from anxious voice notes and memory. Paul's vibe, though? 100% intact (I hope.)
The Artist: Origins of a Tinkerer
Paul grew up drawing, taping stop-motion and experimenting with a camcorder, sneaking into After Effects in his early teens the way others did Napster. Painting at art school lasted about a semester: "Static images started feeling like I'd hit pause on life."
Friends at ILM and Disney Animation prompted him for Film School and he listened.
Failure as Launch-Pad
At his first student-film showcase he screened a slap-stick comedy short to stone silence, just crickets and no laughs, while the crowd reacted to arty films and tortured dramas. "Bombing that hard was liberating," he grins. Translation: if nobody's clapping anyway, you might as well break stuff.
Cue his famous 50-phone bullet-time rig, followed by the drone-only one-take At the End of the Cul-de-Sac. Same motto: pushing the tools until they squeal and spit out something wild, in his own words: "Every new technology is an opportunity for a new visual concept."
Prompts: A New Cinematic Language
Early DALL·E beta? In his inbox. Sora? Same. Paul treats generators like weird cameras: prompting hundreds of shots, making impossible moves, then carving a story out of the ones that bite back, all self-edited and composed. Only after that chaos comes the "grown-up" phase: building scripts, storyboards and animatics.
Reverse order from most directors, but the juice is in the mess, a process that lives on to this day.
Inside Asteria
Now he co-runs Asteria in L.A., a production studio where cel animators, CG experts, and AI geeks swap files like trading cards. Their first flex, Cuco - A Love Letter to L.A., riffs on Paul Flores's murals: think wall-art textures, 2D graffiti, 3D comps and physics, and AI-bred smog sunsets stitched into a fast-cut valentine to the city.
Too Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth, 2025. Shyama Golden
Side quest: OFFF Barcelona 2025 scored a sneak peek of Too Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth, Paul's upcoming short spun from Shyama Golden's riot-hued paintings (she's also Mrs. Trillo). Surreal fauna and shape-shifters burst across the screen in a style that melts every technique, and the crowd went nuts.
Meet Marey: Clean & Fair Video Model
Dropping this summer: Marey, Asteria's baby with ex-Google outfit Moonvalley.ai. Every training clip is licensed straight from filmmakers, cash in their pocket, name in the credits. Built by artists for artists.
Paul teased a day-one power move: director-style camera paths and multi-cam takes of the same shot. Hollywood directors (and lawyers) are already circling.
On "AI Glop" & the Next Five Years
We closed on the sludge clogging Instagram: copy-paste surrealism, no-effort narratives, blurry cat palaces, yada yada. Paul predicts most of this Glop evaporates once novelty wears off.
The survivors? Real artists who treat the machine like any other instrument, learn its quirks, push harder, repeat. "Craft always outlasts shortcuts," he shrugged.
Hard to argue.
paultrillo.com
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