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.
“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.”
