Google releases short film blending physical cardboard puppetry with Gemini Omni and experimental DeepMind models

We wanted to see if we could take simple, physical materials (like cardboard and markers) and use AI to bring them to life. What was the result? A short film starring a bunch of TPUs getting ready for the big stage at Google I/O 2026! Working with director Laurie Rowan and Nexus Studios, we kept human artistry at the center of the film by blending puppetry and 3D animation with our models to do the following ↓ Nano Banana: Generated beautifully stylized first frames from the raw puppet footage and basic 3D animations. @GoogleAIStudio: Built a custom tool inside the platform to test these frames at scale, ensuring pixel-perfect consistency Gemini Omni & experimental @GoogleDeepMind Models: Merged the base animation and stylized frames to elevate the final piece to a cinematic level. Our AI pipelines were specifically designed to protect the crafty details that give these films their heart, like the tiny human imperfections of puppetry, or the nuance an animator can build into an expression.