Mara & Milo: Magic & Mayhem

Created by two artists within Dimension’s Gen-AI team, Mara & Milo: Magic & Mayhem is a demonstration of what’s possible with Dimension’s AI content pipeline. The short proof of concept, in the style of a cute kids animation, introduces us to the titular witch and her mischievous cat familiar in a short narrative that was created entirely with AI, including storyboarding, design, animation, graphics and audio.

Dimension’s aim was to explore the current capabilities of AI and test an end-to-end pipeline that supports our artists' creativity enabling them to direct AI with greater control and consistency. The goal of Mara & Milo was to see how effective that pipeline can be in accelerating the creative process, providing efficiencies and supporting improved productivity with AI as a creative partner to the artists.

And while this demonstration of Dimension’s AI content pipeline is an animated film, the pipeline supports the creation of any style of content including photorealistic to accommodate specific requirements from clients.

Watch the behind the scenes film of how we used the pipeline to bring Mara & Milo to life.

Under the direction of two technical artists the short film used AI at every stage of production. An initial script was written with the support of a language model, image generation was used to quickly iterate on both character and environment design and then an image-to-video model added movement to still images.

Whilst every stage relied on these AI tools, what's key to the project is the artistic skill and the understanding of art and composition needed to use them. The pipeline provides our artists with consistency in the design of the characters and environments between prompts, and much greater control over what the AI models do with those prompts to output something that looks more cohesive and points to the future potential of AI pipelines.

“The team has done an excellent job in demonstrating how much can be done in a Gen-AI first production environment, and the impact the tools can have on an active project,” commented Junaid Baig, Chief Innovation Officer at Dimension Studio. “The pipeline that’s been developed by the team took a production process that would usually have taken months and reduced it to weeks.”

“Dimension has helped pioneer the adoption of real-time technologies in film and virtual production and we view Gen AI as the next real time technology, one that will be hugely influential to the future of filmmaking and the emergence of new production approaches. For us it’s about exploring the potential of AI and putting new tools in the hands of our artists in a way which empowers them and ultimately means they can be more creative and productive."

Simon Windsor, Co-CEO, Dimension Studio

An in-depth look at the AI content pipeline

In order to bring Mara & Milo to life, the team outlined four phases of development and production, each supported by AI.

Design was an exploratory phase to find the film’s characters and imagine the environments in which they’d live and play. We ideated on different styles and approaches they could take with the film’s look and feel. We then used image generation models to iterate quickly on these ideas, and created options that could be reviewed much faster than we’d be able to if we needed to draw each concept by hand.

Then it was time to narrow down the options and Refine those designs into final assets that would appear in the final film. This is where it became important that the pipeline gave the team the best possible control in order to deliver consistent output between prompts to the AI models.

The third stage was to Merge all of the separate assets together and design the composition of each shot and was the stage which required a huge amount of artistic decision-making on the artists’ part. The output of this stage was final scene-setting still images which were the keys to unlocking the final stage.

Finally to Make the final shots, the team directed a video generation model to turn the scene-setting stills into moving images. The final output is an incredibly high quality animated asset, the production of which wouldn't have been possible without all of the artistic development and decision-making needed across every stage of development.

The pipeline was announced with Dimension's commitment to deploying ethical and responsible AI. The company’s AI policy will be continually updated as the technology continues to develop and is available for anyone to review here.