‘Cupcake & Friends,’ ‘Love, Diana Music Hunters’ and ‘Punky Duck’ will be produced using Amazon MGM Studios and AWS’ Project Nara AI platform; new initiative was just announced at AI on the Lot at Culver Studios.
Prime Video has ordered three animated series from the GenAI Creators’ Fund, a new Amazon MGM Studios and Amazon Web Services initiative announced May 27 at AI on the Lot at Culver Studios in Los Angeles.
The fund’s first greenlit projects are Cupcake & Friends from BuzzFeed Studios; Love, Diana Music Hunters from creator Albie Hecht, Chief Content Officer at pocket.watch; and Punky Duck from creator Jorge R. Gutierrez. All three series will premiere on Prime Video at a future date.
- Cupcake & Friends follows a relatable cupcake and her friends as they face the hilarious and thrilling challenges of a sleepover, with unexpected twists at every corner. The series was created by BuzzFeed Studios.
- Love, Diana Music Hunters is based on pocket.watch creator partner Diana, described by the companies as the most followed girl in the world on YouTube. The series follows a young band of K-pop space-traveling musicians racing to Planet Goo, where they must perform a concert to restore the music and save the aliens. The project was created at pocket.watch by Hecht, former President of Entertainment at Nickelodeon and developer of SpongeBob SquarePants.
- Punky Duck follows a lovable punk duck and his best friend, Smiley Cat, as they tear through a wildly exaggerated Los Angeles, hilariously stumbling into alien invasions, giant monsters, robot criminal conspiracies, telenovela-style family drama and supernatural mayhem, while trying, and usually failing, to do the right thing. The series was created by Emmy-winning Gutierrez, writer and director of the animated feature The Book of Life for 20th Century Studios and creator of El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera for Nickelodeon and Maya and the Three for Netflix.
The GenAI Creators’ Fund gives creators of all styles and backgrounds access to professional-grade AI tools and funding, bringing together established filmmakers, digital creators and technology startups to produce cinematic entertainment. The fund is backed by Amazon MGM Studios and AWS to assist professional filmmakers in developing GenAI workflows; provide grants for proof-of-concepts and shorts from creators who have built large audiences on digital platforms but have not had access to professional production tools; and give startups building production solutions access to Studios and AWS expertise to validate technology against cinematic workflows.
Project Nara, Amazon MGM Studios’ purpose-built AI production platform for cinematic storytelling built on AWS, powers the initiative. Used exclusively by Amazon MGM Studios and creators selected for the GenAI Creators’ Fund, Project Nara is a collaborative production workspace where creative teams can generate video, make edits, provide feedback and track progress in real time. It supports both animation and live-action production workflows, reflecting Amazon MGM Studios’ stated belief that human creativity leads and AI supports.
“Creative breakthroughs happen when visionary storytellers are given access to transformative tools,” said Albert Cheng, Head of AI Studios, Amazon MGM Studios. “The GenAI Creators’ Fund and Project Nara position human creativity at the center of our efforts to integrate generative AI into our production processes at Amazon MGM Studios. We’re proud of the work that these filmmakers have accomplished and look forward to sharing these creators’ visions with the world.”
Project Nara is an end-to-end collaborative workspace that integrates AI production agents with professional tools creators already use, including Maya, Blender, Nuke, Unreal Engine and Adobe Suite. The platform combines third-party video models with a proprietary model portfolio trained on Amazon MGM Studios’ existing IP to address cinematic production challenges including character consistency, smooth motion between shots and cross-shot continuity.
Key features of Project Nara include a model-agnostic architecture that routes each task to the optimal AI model; compounding intelligence designed to make subsequent production faster and more efficient; production-aware AI agents that carry creative context across titles; a camera-to-cloud data bridge preserving on-set data end to end; and complete provenance tracking for IP protection. AWS provides Amazon MGM Studios with global cloud infrastructure and services that enable end-to-end AI content creation.
“Amazon has quietly and methodically assembled the only end-to-end AI content creation ecosystem in the industry, spanning from infrastructure to creative tools to distribution and funding of creative content,” said Samira Bakhtiar, GM of Media & Entertainment, Games, and Sports, AWS. “Project Nara illustrates how AWS can help filmmakers of all kinds bring AI to the full creative pipeline, from concept to screen, using a wide range of familiar models and tools on a cloud trusted by the entertainment industry. With investments like the GenAI Creators’ Fund, our collaboration with Innovative Dreams around hybrid filmmaking, and partnerships with leading generative AI providers like Luma and fal, AWS is building an ecosystem for human creativity powered by AI.”
Source: Prime Video
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
