A director's five-year bet turned previs into co-direction

The picture

Writer-director Dan Trachtenberg's relationship with The Third Floor began, by chief creative officer Joshua Wassung's account, in 2020, when Trachtenberg 'turned to previs/postviz studio The Third Floor to create storyboards, previs, and live-direct performance capture' for 'Prey,' the 2022 Predator prequel. Cartoon Brew's interview with Wassung, published the day before the film's 6 June 2025 Hulu debut, states that Trachtenberg and Wassung are 'the co-directors of Predator: Killer of Killers,' five years after that first collaboration. The Third Floor's own site now frames the finished film as 'our first Animated Feature, taking us well beyond previsualization.'

What the documents show

Wassung's account is specific about sequencing: The Third Floor had been building an animation department 'in parallel with Prey' since 2020, using an internal short film to test whether a plugin-based pipeline could scale, before Trachtenberg raised the idea of an animated Predator feature during a call 'at some point ... during COVID.' Cartoon Brew's published interview is the only source available to this entry for that origin story; it has not been independently corroborated by a second account, and this entry does not treat Wassung's chronology as verified beyond what he states to Cartoon Brew. The studio's own site confirms only the outcome, the finished film and its 'first Animated Feature' framing, not the interpersonal history behind it.

What it is allowed to decide

A co-director credit on a delivered, distributed feature is a class 6, regulated artifact claim about authorship, not a previs-stage approval; Wassung's title is stated plainly in the interview. The sources establish Provenance for the working relationship's origin, a named production, a named prior film, a dated release, but do not establish Auditability for the creative-development record itself, since the only account of how the pitch and greenlight process unfolded is a single retrospective interview with one participant, not a contemporaneous, reproducible document.

The disclosure label

In the site's format: a co-director credit on a 2025 animated feature, arising from a previs-vendor relationship the studio's own creative officer traces to 2020; class 6 as a delivered final credit; holds Provenance for the relationship's documented origin; does not hold Auditability for the development narrative, which rests on one retrospective interview; dated 16 September 2026; asserted by The Third Floor's chief creative officer in a trade interview, not by a contemporaneous production record.

• Does a five-year working relationship on previs and performance capture qualify a vendor for a directing credit, or is that a separate negotiation?
• What would a contemporaneous production document, a deal memo, a greenlight note, add that a retrospective interview cannot?
• When a studio's own website frames a film as a 'first,' whose claim is that, and what does it leave out?

The credit itself is a matter of public record; the account of how it was earned is, so far, one participant's telling, which this entry preserves as exactly that.