The story
BAIT is a short natural history mockumentary written and directed by Asa Movshovitz. It comes from a lifelong love of dinosaurs and of the wildlife documentaries he grew up on, in the tradition of David Attenborough. The film investigates a phenomenon from the age of the dinosaurs that nobody has ever talked about: the bait. What if nature was so cruel that in every clutch of eggs, one hatchling was born to stick out, so obviously that it drew the predators away from the rest? There is, of course, no fossil evidence. The bait was always eaten. BAIT is a proper short film, with a storyline, characters and a clear act structure, and it is now being developed into a feature.
What we did
BAIT started as an experiment. As an animation studio, and one of the early adopters of virtual production, we are always testing new tools that could help our pipelines and our work. Generative AI sits uneasily with much of the animation industry, and we wanted to find out for ourselves whether it could do anything genuinely creative and useful. By the end of 2025 we had been testing generative AI across different stages of production, including concept and movement. One thing kept working well: fantasy and creature-heavy, VFX-style material, dinosaurs especially. Then Google released Veo 3.1 in Flow, alongside its Nano Banana image model. For the first time it felt like something that could almost be directed: build shots, keep characters consistent and tell a narrative story. So we wrote a story to put it to the test. The aim was simple: to see where generative AI really stood at that point in time. Production took about two months. The film has since been selected by 15 festivals and has won awards along the way.
Stills
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Credits
