TrashCanRoxanne Took Four Decades of 2D Animation Into Solo AI Filmmaking

In 1987 Roxanne Ducharme's job in Tokyo was to listen to an English soundtrack and mark the exposure sheets so Japanese animators knew which mouth shape to draw on which frame. Two years earlier she'd been an inbetweener in Montreal, filling in the drawings between someone else's key poses.

She spent most of the next four decades in 2D animation: features, TV series, commercials, documentaries. Now, as TrashCanRoxanne, she writes, directs and edits short films made with AI, and on her recent ones she builds the score from samples of her own voice.

She arrived at AI already knowing how to shoot a film. Asked by Life in the Machine what she brought over from animation, she said: "Everything that has to do with film, cinematic language, camera moves, lighting especially."

She posts as @trashcanroxanne on Instagram and keeps her films on her YouTube channel, alongside some of her old 2D work.

Inbetweening in Montreal, mouths in Tokyo, cereal ads in London

Ducharme studied animation at Concordia University for four years and never learned to inbetween there. "I learned on my first job in 1985," she told Life in the Machine. That job was at a Montreal studio making a TV series co-produced with Belgium.

The Tokyo job came next. "My job was to listen to the soundtrack and write on the exposure sheet which mouth to put for the Japanese animators, because they didn't understand English," she said.

Then London, where small studios were turning out ads. "Lots of 2D animated breakfast cereal commercials," she said. While she was there she worked on Steven Spielberg's An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, then went to Paris for an Asterix feature.

One of those cereal spots is still on her channel. She uploaded a Trix commercial from the early 90s with a note that "it's probably not the final copy, but it's the only one I have." The Trix rabbit finds a family scrapbook, heads to Uncle Harry's theater expecting a pile of Trix, and finds a magician's act instead.

After Paris she went back to Montreal and stayed more than 20 years. Her about page lists the work from that stretch and earlier: director, animator, art director, animation supervisor, storyboard artist, layout artist and character designer, on credits including the Oscar-nominated short The Village and the series Arthur. Her 2D portfolio also covers Toopy & Binoo: The Movie, video games, and illustrated segments for documentaries.

Thirty-odd years of other people's characters

The work paid, but it wasn't hers. "When I worked in traditional animation, I rarely did what I wanted; they already had the personality and look of the character written down," she told the musician Sukie Smith in a 2024 conversation for The Lab Mag.

"Almost all of my career in animation, I've worked on cute stuff for kids, pre-school, not scary, you know, and I got really fed up with it," she said. The things she actually wanted to draw were stranger. "They've been stuck in there forever, and now, with AI, I can finally let them out."

The turn was practical as much as creative. During COVID she spent two years on character design and animation supervision for a Montreal studio's feature, and then the work dried up. "So I thought fuck it, I am going to learn about AI," she told Smith.

She'd watched 3D arrive decades earlier and never learned it, and she told Life in the Machine she regretted that. When AI showed up she thought, "Okay, this time I'm not going to miss the boat."

The rest came quickly: "Once I tried it, I realized that I loved it. I got addicted. And now I wouldn't even take a contract in regular 2D animation anymore."

A music video for a real musician

Her first images were circus freaks in black and white, then human bodies with fish heads. "I'm obsessed with marine creatures," she told Smith.

That conversation was about the video she'd just made for Smith's song We Try Not To Think About It Now. Runway had brought her into its Creative Partners Program, and the video credits Midjourney for the images and Runway's support. Ducharme described it as "the first film made entirely with AI, that I am aware of, for a musician, a real person, not for AI-generated music." She also said it's now "possible to make a film like ours in a matter of weeks, just me."

It's a five-minute trip through a candy-colored Los Angeles: women in peach and pink wigs on the boulevards, a blue-haired bassist in a red-lit club, a POV drive into downtown.

Her awards page lists a first prize for it at the AI film festival in Seoul in April 2025.

Short prompts, mood and lighting

Her prompting goes against the long-paragraph habit. "I like to keep it very simple so that the AI can surprise me. There is a lot of improvisation in my workflow," she told Smith. She adds small words like surreal atmosphere or peculiar, and says it "really helps AI to describe an atmosphere, the mood, the lighting, and even a feeling."

She says each tool has its own habits. The image generator she uses most makes the best images but, she said, "it's like talking to a stubborn toddler." One video model won't hold still: "no matter what I say, the camera is moving all the time; even if I say not to move, it just does what it wants."

When Life in the Machine asked about training data, she said she leaves other artists out of her prompts: "Personally, I try not to mention styles or names when I prompt because I want to do original stuff."

She's also clear about what doesn't work yet. "Right now to have the continuity of the same background, different angles, that's difficult," she said, and she thinks a TV series or feature would need a hybrid of AI with 2D or 3D.

The Sea That Dreamed

Her best-known short follows a small pink creature named Wynn, alone in the deep, who finds a jar full of eyes. Each one holds a memory from above the water, and Wynn uses them to build a world of his own.

She wrote about why on an earlier upload of the film: "I made this little film while thinking about people living through war and suffering. It was my way of sending out a small message of hope: to not give up, and to keep dreaming."

The latest version is "created entirely with AI, from images and animation to voiceover, music, and sound effects," according to its description. The end credits list ChatGPT, Midjourney, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Photoshop, Runway, Kling 2.5, Veo 3, Seedance, Freepik, Higgsfield, Topaz, ElevenLabs, Suno and Premiere.

It won Best AI Short at the AI International Film Festival in Los Angeles in July 2025, per her awards page. Not everything she makes is solo. FOSSiLS, a non-fiction short about traces humans might leave behind, was written by Johanne Tremblay with music by Daniel Scott, and SHORELINE 7, a found-footage sci-fi piece, was a collaboration with MontyPhyt Studios. Kim Bubbs narrates both.

A score made from her own voice

The music is the part a 2D job never handed her. "I even make my own music," she told Life in the Machine.

"I create everything – I don't need anybody else. It's so liberating."

Her 2026 showreel says how: "Music generated with Suno, using samples of my own voice." Its festival cut, a film called ELSEWHERE, is "set to an original wordless score created from samples of my own voice," and she describes it as "edited with the rhythm and freedom of a music video."

ELSEWHERE runs just over two minutes. Beak-headed figures on stilt legs stand on a foggy beach, octopus-headed creatures crawl across wet sand, a bald man and an orange-wigged woman stare into the lens through oversized glasses, and a goggled pig holds a ray gun against manga speed lines.

What carried over from 2D

The cinema craft is the obvious part, and she adds one more: "I've also worked as an art director in animation, so that helps me too." She told Smith the characters she invents now feel like friends, each with a personality she gives them.

Not every former colleague was happy about the switch. Asked about the backlash, she said, "A bit less now because I think they unfollowed me or blocked me." Others have messaged her privately asking where to start, and she told Life in the Machine she's thought about running AI workshops just for animators who already know cinematography.

She'd like the field to look different, too. "I see way too many car chases, guns, explosions. Guy stuff," she said, and she wants more artists in it, playing with the tools instead of imitating live action. Kelly Boesch is another artist who came to AI after a long film career; she built a studio of one with AI after 17 years at IMAX.

What she's working on now

She's based in Panama and is a Creative Partner with several AI platforms, according to her about page, which means some uploads on her channel are tool tests rather than films. In mid-2025 she told Life in the Machine she'd spent a few months as AI Creative Director at AI Visionaries, a hybrid advertising studio Pascal Blais was starting up. Pascal Blais Studio has its own section in her 2D portfolio. In London, Park Village represents her for commercial work.

In 2026 Leonardo.Ai named her one of its top 50 women AI filmmakers, a list her about page notes was featured by Forbes Australia.

Her June upload, The Dove Room, was made for an exhibition project organized by Creativa magazine, shown in group exhibitions in Spain and screened in Times Square. A white dove flies through a run of all-white rooms, landing for a moment beside each of the women sitting alone there, their hair woven up into huge forms that look like birds' nests.