Former Syfy Executive Mark Stern, Lloyd Braun Launch AI Animation Studio Intelligent Animation (EXCLUSIVE)

The idea for a new AI animation studio came to Mark Stern through podcasts.

Stern, the former head of original content for Syfy, was trying to figure out a way three years ago to visually augment the podcasts native to his studio Echoverse when he and his business partner, former ABC and WME chairman Lloyd Braun, landed on a solution: Intelligent Animation, a studio that fuses traditional animation with machine-learning AI tools in a bid to produce cheaper and faster shows. The company, which is led by Stern as president, currently has six projects in active development, with two — “The Dragon Prince’s Bride,” based on a novel by C.J. Young, and “The Prince’s Personal Physician,” both of which were licensed from the webcomics platform Tapas — arriving on Braun’s microseries platform aTwist later this year.

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“What you’ve seen in this space, without question, is a certain amount of abuse of these technologies, and people taking licenses and liberties with it,” Stern told Variety in a recent interview. “We ended up enlisting a team of animators, and I think that was a pretty significant thing for us, because we started with the animation and the animators first. So it was really about how do we enhance their creative process, starting with traditional animation, and then bringing in technologies to basically expedite that process.”

Microseries have become a boon in the entertainment industry, and a report last year pegged the format to generate $16.2 billion by 2030 in China alone. While the variety of microseries span from live-action to animated to AI-generated, the topic of AI in the animation industry remains divisive, with animators and entertainment companies split between the potential for lowering costs and the risk to jobs for animators trained in traditional methods.

Stern posits that his company is taking the responsible approach to melding the two through its hiring of traditional animators and rejection of the “creepy weirdness” produced by photoreal-generated images. Still, he claims, AI use is “inevitable,” and “therefore really important that we do it in the right way.”

”I think there’s a tendency to tar everyone with the AI brush, no matter what, and I understand why, because there has been some irresponsible behavior in this world,” he said. “But I really believe that the nuance of it is what matters, and that when you get into the nuance and people, there is a right way to use this that is going to really be powerful.”

Intelligent Animation artists start the platform with human-written scripts, human voice actors and some hand-drawn animation, with AI tools based on between six to eight different models helping animators with functions such as lip-syncing human voice performances or enhancing specific animated scenes. Generated shots are limited, Stern said, to cases such as aiding in a background scene.

Stern declined to share details on the models the company is using, admitting he was “not very well versed on them.” He also declined to discuss the company’s funding structure, though he said the studio had an investor and that the shows’ budgets were “commensurate” to other microseries. SAG-AFTRA’s recent verticals agreement covered shows produced with budgets up to $300,000.

Each of the studio’s 12 full-time animators — along with the 18 or so contracted freelancers, with the teams moving between projects — is expected to abide by the company’s “AI Code of Conduct,” which mandate following agreements set by the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA and prohibit the use of generative AI to produce scripts, clone an actor’s voice or likeness without consent or use copyrighted content as models for animation.

“What was really clear from us from the start is, this is not a one-stop shop, in terms of one app takes care of everything,” Stern said. “It’s not about ‘you plug something in, and then you just get it.’ It’s really an iterative process, a multidisciplinary process, where you have to apply all sorts of different tools to get what you need.”

The goal is to mirror the time it takes a production company to produce a live-action microseries, which Stern pegged at four months from script to release and twice as long for a traditionally animated microseries. Using Intelligent Animation’s platforms, he said, artists can bring to life high-quality microseries within that four-month window, not the “AI slop” Stern said currently proliferates some of the microseries platforms.

“Microdramas, I think, are also in that same continuum of there are companies that don’t care, they don’t particularly necessarily care about the level of their storytelling,” Stern said. “And there are companies like aTwist and GammaTime and others that are really trying to strive for something that is showing what this form can be and how good the storytelling can be, and we certainly fall in that same place of, ‘There’s a way to do this that really elevates it,’ and I think that’s where that’s where we want to see ourselves.”

Stern said Intelligent Animation’s ambitions were broader than the microseries medium, and that he was hopeful its upcoming projects could be a “proof-of-concept” for how its platform could be used. Still, the company was talking to platforms such as GammaTime and other intellectual property holders for potential projects.

“We really think that the real growth opportunity for us as a company is in the fact that we can create high-class animation faster and less expensively than traditionally,” he said. “So just being able to talk to people that have content that they would love to get made, but they just can’t afford what a traditional animation costs.”

Watch a sizzle reel for the company below: