LOS ANGELES—In a notable example of how major Hollywood studios are embracing AI-powered production tools, Amazon MGM Studios and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have announced the GenAI Creators' Fund and its first green-lit projects.
The initiative aims to give creators of all styles and backgrounds access to professional-grade AI tools and funding, bringing together established filmmakers, digital creators, and technology startups to produce high-quality cinematic entertainment.
Amazon MGM Studios also revealed three green-lit animation projects originating from the fund: “Cupcake & Friends” from BuzzFeed Studios; “Love, Diana Music Hunters” from creator Albie Hecht, now chief content officer at pocket.watch; and “Punky Duck” from creator Jorge R. Gutierrez. All three series will premiere on Prime Video at a future date.
The production will use Project Nara, Amazon MGM Studios' purpose-built AI production platform for cinematic storytelling, built on AWS.
Project Nara is used exclusively by Amazon MGM Studios and by creators selected for the GenAI Creators' Fund.
As a collaborative production workspace in which creative teams can generate video, make edits, provide feedback, and track progress in real time, Project Nara supports both animation and live-action production workflows. Amazon MGM Studios says the the technology reflects one of the company’s core beliefs: human creativity leads, and AI supports.
“Creative breakthroughs happen when visionary storytellers are given access to transformative tools,” said Albert Cheng, head of AI Studios, Amazon MGM Studios. “The GenAI Creators’ Fund and Project Nara position human creativity at the center of our efforts to integrate generative AI into our production processes at Amazon MGM Studios. We’re proud of the work that these filmmakers have accomplished and look forward to sharing these creators’ visions with the world.”
The fund is backed by Amazon MGM Studios and AWS to assist professional filmmakers in developing GenAI workflows. It provides grants for proofs of concept and shorts from creators who have built massive audiences on digital platforms but have not had access to professional production tools. Finally, it also gives startups building production solutions access to expertise from Amazon MGM Studios and AWS, who can judge the technology’s usefulness in actual cinematic workflows.
Amazon MGM Studios describes the first round of greenlit projects originating from the fund as follows:
- “Cupcake & Friends”: A relatable cupcake and her friends face the hilarious and thrilling challenges of a sleepover, with unexpected twists at every corner. Created by BuzzFeed Studios.
- “Love, Diana Music Hunters”: Based on pocket.watch creator partner Diana, the most-followed girl in the world on YouTube, this young band of K-pop space-traveling musicians races to Planet Goo, where they must perform a concert to restore the music and save the aliens. Created by Albie Hecht at pocket.watch, former president of entertainment at Nickelodeon and developer of “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
- “Punky Duck”: A lovable punk duck and his best friend, Smiley Cat, tear through a wildly exaggerated Los Angeles, hilariously stumbling into alien invasions, giant monsters, robot criminal conspiracies, telenovela-style family drama and supernatural mayhem—all while trying (and usually failing) to do the right thing. Created by Emmy-winning Jorge R. Gutierrez, writer/director of the animated feature “The Book of Life” for 20th Century Studios and creator of “El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera” for Nickelodeon and “Maya and the Three” for Netflix.
Project Nara is an end-to-end collaborative workspace that integrates AI production agents with professional tools already used by creators, such as Maya, Blender, Nuke, Unreal Engine and Adobe Suite, Amazon said. It combines best-in-class third-party video models with a proprietary model portfolio trained on Amazon MGM Studios' existing IP, solving complex cinematic challenges like character consistency, smooth motion between shots, and cross-shot continuity that no single model can address alone. AWS’s cloud infrastructure and AI capabilities enable storytelling at scale, according to Amazon.
Project Nara’s key features include: a model-agnostic architecture that routes each task to the optimal AI model; compounding intelligence that makes every subsequent production faster and more efficient; production-aware AI agents that carry full creative context across titles; a camera-to-cloud data bridge preserving on-set data end-to-end; and complete provenance tracking for IP protection, Amazon said.
AWS provides Amazon MGM Studios with global cloud infrastructure and services that enable end-to-end AI content creation.
"Amazon has quietly and methodically assembled the only end-to-end AI content creation ecosystem in the industry, spanning from infrastructure to creative tools to distribution and funding of creative content,” said Samira Bakhtiar, general manager of Media & Entertainment, Games, and Sports, AWS. “Project Nara illustrates how AWS can help filmmakers of all kinds bring AI to the full creative pipeline, from concept to screen, using a wide range of familiar models and tools on a cloud trusted by the entertainment industry. With investments like the GenAI Creators’ Fund, our collaboration with Innovative Dreams around hybrid filmmaking, and partnerships with leading generative AI providers like Luma and fal, AWS is building an ecosystem for human creativity powered by AI.”
