How a Prague studio makes an AI series in weeks, not years

Gedeon Drapák, founder of the Prague studio Eden Makers, set out to prove that making an animated series doesn’t require years of work, an entire film studio, or hundreds of millions of crowns in budget — just a small team and artificial intelligence. His studio is releasing an anthology of 12 short films in the style of the hit Netflix show Love, Death & Robots, and the first episode has already come out.

According to Drapák, a team of four people created two mini-episodes in parallel in about two weeks, and the production cost of one episode came to around 45,000 crowns. “If we’d done it the usual way, in a 3D graphics program, it would have taken at least three months to get comparable quality, and it would have cost fifteen times more,” he told CzechCrunch.

The first seven-minute short film, Zero to Hero, is styled as an animated musical about two teenagers who, through a shared love of music, stand up to bullying and find love. By Drapák’s own admission, though, the quality still falls short of the original — the AI animation shows typical flaws: lifeless facial expressions, features that “drift” between scenes, and overly fast editing.

Eden Makers was founded earlier this year, after a group of six friends spent a quarter working with neural networks to make the film Mindfall Protocol. Besides Drapák, the company was co-founded by Ondřej Hubálek — both previously worked at Microsoft’s Czech office and at the British tech firm Neuron, Drapák as an AI marketing specialist and Hubálek as a designer.

The studio’s first film cost about 75,000 crowns, not counting salaries, since the team made it in their spare time. According to the founder, though, that investment has already paid for itself about twenty times over thanks to commercial commissions.

The studio uses its own actors — seven team members film in simple home setups, and AI is then used to change their faces, backgrounds, props and lighting. The biggest challenge was character consistency — faces kept changing from scene to scene, a typical problem in AI production. To fix this, the team built its own platform, Eden Frame, where a detailed description of each character’s appearance is uploaded, and the films themselves are created directly inside the app. The team uses Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, depending on which tool handles a given task best.

Drapák is convinced that within a couple of years, most film production will be done with the help of artificial intelligence, and that his small team is able to compete with entire film crews.