Amazon is embarking on a major push to integrate generative AI into all corners of its business, and entertainment is no exception, with the tech company launching a new fund on Wednesday to incentivize creators to use the tech throughout the production pipeline.
The company’s Amazon MGM Studios and Amazon Web Services divisions announced a GenAI Creators Fund that will offer filmmakers, digital creators and startups funding and access to Amazon’s AI tools in order to create “high-quality cinematic entertainment.”
Says Albert Cheng, the head of AI Studios for Amazon MGM Studios, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter: “AI unlocks a lot of things that always been cost prohibitive for us when we’re making storytelling with incredible scope.” He adds, “We are able to take world building shows or movies and shoot them on a sound stage in much faster time than it has been in the past.”
The announcement took place during the tech company’s “AI on the Lot” event in Culver City, where the first few greenlit projects emerging from the fund were also unveiled. They include three original animated series: Punky Duck from Maya and the Three and The Book of Life director Jorge Gutierrez and Love, Diana Music Hunters, a series featuring pocket.watch and YouTube star Diana, created by former Nickelodeon exec Albie Hecht. The third series order is Cupcake & Friends from Buzzfeed Studios.
Projects from the Fund will use Amazon’s Project Nara platform, a new production tool on Amazon Web Services that features third-party generative AI models like Kling as well as a proprietary AI tool trained on Amazon MGM Studios projects. The platform additionally features traditional industry tools like Blender, Maya and Adobe Suite.
Project Nara is geared at serving creative teams, says Cheng. “What it tries to do is it streamlines and facilitates the end-to-end workflows of what we do, but also leverages the existing applications that professionals already know about,” he adds.
Amazon MGM Studios also has access to the platform but, notes Cheng, Amazon’s AI Studios are the most engaged users. “Is it being used for other films and TV shows? Yes,” he says. “But in what I would call point solutions where most companies are using AI today and it’s mostly, ‘I have this VFX shot. I wonder if it could be cracked by AI, can you help us with it?’ And we have been doing that for a lot of our films and our TV shows.”
The Fund found its animated projects through referrals from Amazon’s animation team and from agents who knew creatives who were AI-curious. That may not have been easy in a field where many creatives feel threatened by, ethically torn about and/or suspicious of generative AI. “You kind of wanted to have people who are leaning into it or curious. Not a whole lot of people are,” admitted Cheng.
Still, another Amazon exec makes the argument that the Fund will help democratize access to professional-grade tools and funding. Samira Panah Bakhtiar, the general manager of media and entertainment for Amazon Web Services, says the initiative will lead to a “leveling of the playing field when it comes to cinematic storytelling.”
Amazon is set to next announce the digital creators it’s collaborating with via the Fund. “The interesting part about the fund is it brings together established filmmakers as well as digital native creators and technology startups,” Panah Bakhtiar says. “So I think it gives, specifically on the tech side, the opportunity for some of these startups to build production solutions for studios and have AWS expertise for validation against some of these real cinematic workflows.” She says it will lead to “more storytelling at scale.”
The new AI effort from Amazon comes as other entertainment companies, both legacy players and tech-forward streaming giants, are trying to integrate the tech into their workflows to make content at a speedier cadence and at a lower cost.
Earlier this year for example Netflix acquired InterPositive, an AI filmmaking company founded by Ben Affleck, with plans to make its tech available to creatives on its films and TV shows. And earlier this month YouTube unveiled a suite of AI tools that will let users “remix” shorts, and even insert themselves into other creator’s videos.
Animation is also seen as ripe for AI disruption, given the ability of models to quickly animate scenes, likely requiring far fewer people to accomplish. Dreamworks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, for example, said that he believes AI can cut the costs of animated feature films by 90 percent.
Cheng, who had been the VP of Prime Video, shifted to his new AI-focused role last summer. The announcements this week are the first fruits of that labor, though they are unlikely to be the last.
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