TechStuff Hollywood’s Afraid of Tilly Norwood. Should They Be? - The Story
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Feb 27, 2026 Eline Van der Velden, actor-producer and founder of Particle 6 who created AI performer Tilly Norwood. She explains crafting Tilly’s look and teaching her to act. They discuss motion capture, surprising AI behavior, Hollywood backlash and labeling issues. Plans for a Tilly-centric TV show and a larger AI character universe are also explored.
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Tilly Started With 2,000 Iterations And Acting Instincts
- Eline Van der Velden built Tilly by iterating on AI prompts and visual tools until the look felt right after roughly 2,000 iterations.
- She treated the process like creating a character, blending acting instincts with generative-image tools and texture work to get skin and presence.
Create AI Actors Like Stage Characters
- Eline designed Tilly using the same character-building process actors use: start with outward details then peel back to backstory and motivation.
- She layered earrings, outfit, humor, and relationships to create a consistent persona for performance and prompting.
Tilly's Acting Came From Prompts Then Eline's Motion Capture
- Early on Eline taught Tilly by prompting an LLM and later used motion capture, with Eline herself doing the mocap to imbue performance.
- She emphasized heavy human input: a team of eight and proprietary workflows across ~50 tools.