{"slug": "how-an-ai-anime-is-created", "title": "How an AI Anime Is Created", "summary": "An AI anime studio creates 20-minute episodes by identifying a single compelling element from a source story and building the episode around it, cutting everything else. The studio uses AI only for animation and FX, while writing, directing, and post-production remain human-led, aiming to make anime financially feasible in the US and pay artists better wages.", "body_md": "We find the one thing that made readers keep scrolling, then build a tight 20 minute\nepisode around it. Everything else gets cut. We don't use LLMs for any of the\nwriting. It's bad writing every time we've tried.\n\nPrimary toolsWriters' room, no AI\n\nBuilt forGen Z · Gen Alpha audiences\n\n02\n\n02 / 04\n\nDirectingHuman\n\nDirecting\n\nEvery shot a painting\n\nA beat sheet locks the action, the shot angle, and the pacing for every scene. Then\nwe use a cheap model to generate fast, rough draft clips just to see if the pacing\nand emotion land before committing to anything.\n\nPrimary toolsBeat sheet · cheap draft generation\n\nDecided by handCharacter look · shot pacing\n\n03\n\n03 / 04\n\nAnimation & FXAI\n\nAnimation & FX\n\nThis is where the anime actually gets shot.\n\nEvery shot gets regenerated in high quality, using character and environment\nreferences to hold consistency. The hard part already happened in directing, so an\nagent reruns the earlier prompts for us, and we only step in to redo a shot that\nmissed the draft.\n\nPrimary toolsCharacter refs · environment refs\n\nStage typeAI generated\n\n04\n\n04 / 04\n\nPost ProductionHuman\n\nPost Production\n\nWhere generated stops looking generated.\n\nFootage gets upscaled and cleaned up frame by frame, fixing whatever AI still gets\nwrong. Then dialogue, music, and sound effects come together into a final mix,\nsubtitled and checked before it ships.\n\nPrimary toolsTopaz · DaVinci · Reaper\n\nHuman passCurate · composite · grade · mix\n\nThe story is the most important part of an anime. Bad story-bad show that's it.\n\nWhy We Do This\n\nWhy not just hire real animators? Why skimp out on anything at all?\n\nThe core reason: Entertainment is\nconstrained financially, and that shapes creative decisions. When Hollywood underperforms,\nwe see more layoffs and in our view more generic shows. Our bet is that if we can make anime financially feasible, we can do two things.\n\nOne, fans here actually get to make anime in the US. Instead of needing to fly to Japan, speak\nJapanese, and preferably be Japanese to break into the industry.\n\nTwo, pay the employees(artists) better. Look up the production\ncommittee system in Japan and how it treats artists if you want the details.\n\nBut TLDR; anime studios are broke, the system isn't changing anytime soon, and it pushes\nindependent contractors into working for dirt poor wages.\n\nWe think a an AI studio fixes many problems in the industry. Smaller and faster means more financially feasible so\nwe can give better wages for artists and enable a new industry to thrive in the US.\n\n1. Story Writing & Adaptation\n\nWhen we choose a story, or write one ourselves, we always have to think about the\nconsumer. That usually means writing for\nthe standard anime watcher, typically Gen Z or Gen Alpha, around universal experiences like\nhigh school and exams. Most stories we write target a younger audience, male leaning(we're dudes) and follows\nsimilar problems and struggles we had when we were younger.\n\nIf there's an existing story, like a Korean comic, we have to figure out how to adapt it\ninto an anime. For us, it's quite a big of pre production work because there's just so much content and detail in a story, and\nwe have to bring it down to a 20 minute episode. Otherwise the pacing gets too slow and we\nnever get to the juicy scenes (the fight scenes, the first kiss,etc).\n\nBefore anything gets prompted or we start thinking about shots, someone reads the whole source straight through, or at least what\ncounts as one season. We're hunting for the one thing that made a reader keep scrolling at\n2am. Why did they like this story? Good visuals? Good writing? Good character\nrelationships?\n\nWhatever it is, that's the \"meat\" the adaptation gets built around. Everything else,\nsubplots, side characters, slower arcs, gets tested against it: does this scene serve the\nmeat, or is it just there because the original had room for it? If the latter, we cut that content. Less is more.\n\nWe often have to change pacing and density too. When you read or scroll through a comic,\nyou go at whatever pace suits you. We force everyone to go at a pace we decide due to the nature of the animation medium, and some\npeople are inevitably going to feel like a story is too slow or too fast either way. So we\ntry to protect the core story-that might mean cutting side characters or skipping\nsubplots entirely. In adapation work, it's an unavoidable part-budgets do not get to explore every single side story.\n\nHow we use LLMs here\n\nWe don't. It's really, really bad. Super mediocre, super generic. It's not even slop, it's\nmore like bad Hollywood writing combined with Chatgpt 3.\n\n2. The First Draft\n\nOnce we're happy with the story, we build something we call a \"beat sheet.\" It's another\nscript, but this one details the action and the shot, instead of a broader story. Note that calling it a beat\nsheet is technically wrong, but it stuck because we're naming the 'beats' of a story.\n\nAfter the beat sheet, we get a first draft going. We figure out what the characters look\nlike, then use a cheap model to generate fast, rough clips just to see the pacing of\nthe animation.\n\nMaking the animation itself as a first draft lets us iterate quickly on the action and the feel of each\nscene. Does it fit? Does the emotion land? Does it make sense for the character to do this?\nAnd it allows us to get the visuals and styling of a episode. What does it look like. What mood do we want to evoke with the lighting, etc.\n\n3. Animation\n\nAI Animation\n\nOnce we're happy with the first draft, we take every shot and regenerate it in 720\nquality. For the animation, we use a variety of prompting techniques including character\nreferences, environment references, extending videos, etc to get the same character and\nenvironmental consistency.\n\nThe hard part, getting the draft right, is already done, so this ends up being the least\ntime consuming stage. We literally have an agent rerun all the earlier prompts for us, and\nwe only check in to rerun the occasional shot that didn't follow the draft.\n\n4. Post Production\n\nRaw generations get upscaled and cleaned up\n\nUpscaling means making the resolution bettter. While we generate at 720p, most platforms\nexpect 1080p, so we bump up the resolution using DaVinci Resolve or Topaz Labs (now part of\nAdobe).\n\nCleaning up is a newer task that AI animation studios specifically have to deal with. Pause\non almost any AI generated clip and you'll spot something off: colors morphing strangely,\nlighting that doesn't stay consistent, mouths moving in ways that don't quite make sense.\nFixing that is our job, mostly done by opening photoshop/photo editor and fixing these AI artifacts.\n\nThere's also a handful of things we still have to handle(detailed below in post like sfx and voices)\n\nVoices\n\nDialogue gets recorded/prompted and tested against visuals that are now locked in. A human voice\nactor records it in a session, or an AI voice generates the performance, depending on\nthe character, the budget, and the timeline. Either way, it has to feel emotionally\nright. Two laughs from the same character shouldn't sound the same twice, and each one\nhas to carry the emotion underneath it.\n\nMusic\n\nWe use AI generated music. We're not musicians, and making good original music is an\nenormous amount of work. We could license good music, but it's not worth the hassle for\nsomething that plays for 10 to 15 seconds at most. In most anime, music shows up\nin short segments just to evoke a specific feeling, and outside of the opening and ending\nsongs, few fans pay close attention to it, so it's not worth the investment for us right\nnow.\n\nDown the line, once we're making a full length film, hiring a composer will make a lot\nmore sense, a longer runtime justifies a longer soundtrack, though from what we've\nseen, a lot of shows just reuse the opening or ending theme instead.\n\nSFX\n\nSound effects (footsteps, impacts, magic, ambient environment sound) are almost\nentirely AI generated at this stage instead of pulled from a library. We can create\nexactly the sound we need, and honestly, it's just easier for us.\n\nRoom tone for dialogue\n\nA thin, consistent layer of ambient noise sits under every line of dialogue, so the dialogue doesn't feel empty.\nWe've found ElevenLabs works really well for this.\n\nBy the time editing is done, we've probably watched the content 100+ times. We hit export. Then do this over again\n\nThat's the whole process, from idea to final export. I've probably skimmed a few stuff, so if you have questions, feel free to reach out. I would love to yap", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-an-ai-anime-is-created", "canonical_source": "https://www.aventos.dev/our-process?view=blog", "published_at": "2026-07-22 00:53:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-22 01:22:34.871682+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["generative-ai", "ai-tools", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Topaz", "DaVinci", "Reaper"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-an-ai-anime-is-created", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-an-ai-anime-is-created.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-an-ai-anime-is-created.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-an-ai-anime-is-created.jsonld"}}