By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-03-18 07:01:40 | Updated at 2025-03-18 21:52:10
14 hours ago
A Chinese text-to-video generation start-up said it has signed a deal with a US animation studio to produce an artificial intelligence (AI) generated anime series, in the latest example of Hollywood moving to embrace this fast-developing technology.
Vidu, a Sora-like AI model developed by Chinese AI firm ShengShu Technology and Tsinghua University, has formed a “strategic partnership” with Aura Productions, an American studio founded by Chinese-American actress Luo Yan and creative director D.T. Carpenter, according to a statement from ShengShu.
The partners will launch a 50-episode short science-fiction anime series on “mainstream global social media platforms” in 2025. The first trailer for this series will be released globally in the coming days, it said.
The deal comes as Chinese video-generation models are gaining attention for their capabilities, opening opportunities for downstream applications. Vidu 2.0, unveiled in January, claims the ability to generate high-quality videos in just 10 seconds.
The production deal will leverage Vidu’s “multi-subject consistency” feature to “blend Asian anime elements with Hollywood creativity” to create works that “resonate with young North American audiences”, according to the statement.
Vidu was used to generate a Chinese trailer for the 2024 film Venom: The Last Dance. Separately, last September Baidu’s large model platform Qianfan integrated Vidu into its platform.
ShengShu also teamed up with the China unit of US AI chipmaker AMD to help in “accelerating the launch of AI personal computer applications”, according to a press release issued in March 2024.
