A five - person team, two weeks: They are creating serialized animations with AI | Early - stage project

Text | Liu Chongjiang

At the end of 2024, the world's first AI serialized animation, Fruit Planet, launched by "Walking in Harmony with the Light", was officially released on November 16. The story is set on a "Fruit Planet" 1,105 light - years away, where only fruits and vegetables exist. The protagonists are a group of cute fruit - vegetable humans called "Saturn Eaters", and their adventure begins here.

The world's first AI serialized animation, Fruit Planet

In the past, producing an animation often required months or even years of effort. However, with the advent of AI, the traditional animation production process has also changed. It is reported that during the creation of this work, the creators relied on AI technology for a large amount of character creation and world - view design. Usually, when producing an animation work, team members need to spend a lot of time creating preliminary character images, scene designs, and detailed renderings. In the Fruit Planet project, a production team of only five people, led by a teacher proficient in AI technology and with directing experience, completed character creation, world - view design, and the construction of the first episode in just two weeks.

Display of the animation workflow

It can be said that AI technology is reshaping the creative process, making it easier to realize creativity. In this regard, Chen Faling, CEO of "Walking in Harmony with the Light", mentioned, "Traditional animation has high investment costs and a long production cycle, and the demand in the content market actually cannot keep up. However, if we use AI technology, we can break the high threshold of traditional animation production, create works with richer content and more free styles, and build a truly diverse animation ecosystem for the future."

However, the limitations of AIGC are also obvious. In the real creative process, AI will not execute exactly according to the storyboard envisioned by the creator. In response, the creators of "Walking in Harmony with the Light" gave the answer: learn by doing. "If one way doesn't work, you have to find another way." Such "flexible creation" exists in all aspects of AIGC. However, for enthusiastic creators, this may also be another kind of "fun".

Facing this "uncertainty" in creation, Chen Faling believes that the creative experience of "Walking in Harmony with the Light" in the traditional film and television field has become their greatest advantage in the AIGC field: "What things is AI good at now? Which things can be combined with the traditional model? How to create a new workflow? In the process of answering these questions, we are actually exploring the boundaries of AI film and television."

Some problems faced by creators when using AI for creation at present

For example, "scene consistency, character consistency, and style consistency" are actually the three major technical problems of AICG. In the Fruit Planet project, the creators of "Walking in Harmony with the Light" solved this problem through their unique workflow: "We first use AI to generate various actions, states, expressions of characters, and images from different perspectives, then integrate these images into stills of various scenes, and make fine adjustments to aspects such as lighting, details of character costumes, and facial features to ensure the consistency of characters in different shots."

As of now, the "Walking in Harmony with the Light" team already has more than 60 core AICG creative personnel, making it the largest AIGC creative team in the country. In this regard, Xu Lingyun, CGO of "Walking in Harmony with the Light", mentioned, "Currently, AI companies are mainly divided into two major categories: the model layer and the application layer. 'Walking in Harmony with the Light' is a company focusing on the application layer. And the biggest barrier for application - layer companies is actually talent."

A clip from Fruit Planet

So, how to become a talent in the AIGC field? Chen Faling's answer is: love and continuous learning. "I think love is of course the first step, but if you really want to go further in the AIGC field, you must keep learning. AIGC is changing every day. A new model comes out today, and a new ability appears tomorrow. You have to be willing to spend time trying, researching, and paying attention to things you don't understand but that will affect you. Don't stop at 'curiosity'; become an active learner."

Finally, regarding future planning, Chen Faling pointed out that "Walking in Harmony with the Light" will remain true to its original aspiration and continue to take "integration of industry, academia, and research" as the core of development. In terms of "industry", the team accumulates in - depth understanding and optimization ability of AI tools through a large number of commercial practical projects; in terms of "academia", it summarizes commercial practices into experiences and promotes them to the vision of universities, enterprises, and the public; in terms of "research", the team's self - developed "Youguang AI" software relies on creative intelligent agents to drive multi - modal workflows, making AI content generation more concrete and controllable. "Walking in Harmony with the Light" will continue to polish the content quality, empower creativity with technology, continuously produce high - quality works, and give everyone the opportunity to become a'super individual' in the content era.