Liu Haonan and Qiao Yuhang have been finishing each other’s stories since high school, where they drew together, talked about animation and film, and traded ideas for comics and stories of their own. More than a decade later, they’re doing something a two-person team couldn’t have pulled off a few years ago: building a science-fiction universe spanning 30 light years, almost entirely by themselves, using AI production tools instead of a film crew. Hollywood has largely controlled who gets to tell stories at scale, largely because scale itself required budgets, crews and infrastructure most creators never had access to.
A newer wave of AI production tools is starting to loosen that grip, and the companies building it are converging on Venice this year to make their case. Chief among them is Tamar AI, a Palo Alto company building what it calls the creative infrastructure of the AI era: production tools, streaming platforms and IP incubation programs meant to carry an idea from concept through to an audience. Its flagship product, TapNow, is pitched as an AI-native creative operating system, bundling multimodal AI, intelligent agents and production workflows into one environment that the company says people use for everything from short films to marketing campaigns and presentations.
TapNow says more than 3 million people use the platform daily, spread across 150 countries and regions, and runs a creator community, TapTV, alongside an events arm, TapTV Arena, that has staged more than 30 international hackathons, residencies and creator summits. This aligns well with Tamar AI’s belief that AI amplifies human creativity.” That philosophy fuels 10,000 Parallel Universes, TapNow’s global creator and AI-native IP incubation program. It‘s framed as an alternative to a traditional producer-led development pipeline, built to discover new voices and original stories from around the world.
The program’s first season drew more than 2,000 submissions and offered a prize pool topping $500,000. Selected teams received computing support to produce their projects, and in some cases funding so creators weren’t working under financial pressure. TapNow says it didn’t take copyright in exchange for that support, and it helps teams fill gaps in sound or art and connects them to festival and distribution contacts.
What that support looks like on the ground shows up in how Liu and Qiao actually built “Primordia,” one of the program’s standout projects. Liu worked as a concept designer on film and television productions, including several theatrically released Chinese films, translating screenplays into images so a production designer would have something concrete to discuss with the director. He and Qiao stayed creative partners the whole time, at one point hauling equipment to an island together to shoot a student film.
A frontier boy named Jesse rescues a fugitive military officer named Rook, and the bargain between them pulls both into empire, war and the secret of Jesse’s own origins. Qiao traces the appeal of AI filmmaking to scale as much as tools. Everyone would come to you asking what happened next, and your creative train of thought was constantly being interrupted.” On “Primordia,” he says, it’s mainly the two of them, working through writing, shots and detail before moving into execution.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
