Amazon builds its own AI production platform and greenlights three AI animated series for Prime Video
Key Points
- Amazon and AWS are financing AI-powered film projects through the “GenAI Creators’ Fund” to cut production times.
- The exclusive “Project Nara” platform plugs in-house and third-party AI models directly into industry tools like Blender and Adobe.
- Amazon wants to fix common AI errors and build a professional ecosystem for studio pipelines.
Amazon MGM Studios and AWS announced a “GenAI Creators’ Fund” at the industry event “AI on the Lot,” held at Culver Studios.
The fund gives money and access to an in-house AI production platform to filmmakers, digital creators, and tech startups. Three animated series are already in production, though Amazon MGM Studios says no release date for Prime Video has been set.
Amazon hasn’t disclosed the size of the grants. Albert Cheng, Head of AI Studios at Amazon MGM, told Variety that all projects involve human actors and voice talent. The studio gave each of the three teams five weeks to produce their pilots, a timeline meant to prove that AI-powered production moves far faster than traditional methods.
Project Nara: a closed platform with models trained on MGM IP
The technical backbone is “Project Nara,” a platform built on AWS that’s available only to Amazon MGM and the selected creators. Nara connects AI agents to tools like Maya, Blender, Nuke, Unreal Engine, and the Adobe Suite.
The architecture is model-agnostic. Each task gets routed to whichever AI model fits best. Third-party video models are combined with in-house models trained on Amazon MGM IP. A “provenance tracking” system documents where all content comes from.
Amazon believes Project Nara can fix many of the problems that plague current AI video pipelines, meaning things like inconsistent characters, choppy motion, and continuity breaks between shots.
“One of the biggest complaints we hear from creators is: AI will not do what you want it to do,” Cheng said. Current generators are built for social media, he said. “We are turning those models into usable tools for the industry.”
Samira Bakhtiar, AWS General Manager for Media and Entertainment, framed the strategic ambition more broadly: “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.”
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