Toronto company is built around original IP, with 'The Little Cloud Thief' in development for both feature and episodic; Gaudette's 8-minute short took the $50K Grand Prix at this year's Runway AI Festival.
Filmmaker Bob Gaudette and producer Kirk Hipkiss have launched Nolia Studios, a Toronto AI-native film and television company built around original IP, with the animated property, The Little Cloud Thief, among its first projects.
The launch follows Gaudette's 8-minute short A Face Only a Mother Could Love, which took the $50,000 Grand Prix at the 2026 Runway AI Festival. It also won Best Picture at the OMNI International Film Festival, Best AI Film at the New York International Film Awards, and the David Harold Blackwell Award for AI & Emerging Technology Film at The Eudaimonia Project Film Festival, and was a finalist at the 2026 Reply AI Film Festival in Venice. The Hollywood Reporter called Gaudette "the brave, bold, knock-you-on-your-backside future of filmmaking."
Nolia is positioned to work across film, television and emerging formats; it formalizes a partnership the two have been building over the past year on AI-driven film and broadcast projects.
Hmmm…
Here's the short:
The Little Cloud Thief is in development for both feature and episodic adaptation. Material on its YouTube channel sets the story around Milo Sauveterre, a 6-year-old living in a cardboard house on the scaffolding of Notre-Dame Cathedral, who sees his mother's face in a cloud every Tuesday.
Nolia says it has short and feature-length scripts ready to move into production and has begun developing an AI-animated feature with a film production company based in the UK and Toronto.
"What stood out immediately was not the technology, but the storytelling," said Hipkiss. "Bob has a rare instinct for character and emotional clarity, and Nolia is designed to turn that creative strength into a sustainable studio model."
According to Gaudette, "AI offers new pathways into filmmaking, enabling more people to take part in the creative process. Nolia is built around the idea that powerful stories can come from anywhere, and that the tools now exist to realize them at a high level at reduced budgets."
Hipkiss founded Radical Point Media, a Toronto animation, visual effects, motion graphics and generative AI studio whose recent work includes projects for Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery, A&E Global, Amazon Prime and Bell Media. That company supplies the production infrastructure behind Nolia.
Neither the funding behind Nolia nor a timeline for any of its projects has been announced.
Source: Nolia Studios
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
