Your reminder to not discount Super Intelligence in media production. This is a foreigner with a YouTube channel and access to several models.
Quoting the (translated) description:
"Original Sci-Fi Animation Project: *Space Battleship: Cyclops* – Concept Film.
This concept film was created to bring to life the world and story of an original sci-fi work set in deep space. It is not the main series itself, but rather a production designed to explore the project's world-building, visual style, and narrative potential.
Audio: Japanese | Subtitles: English | Opening Theme: "Zankou no Kanata" (Beyond the Afterglow) | Artist: TR1AD | Planning & Production: Taisho Shin.
*Note: Generative AI was used in a portion of the video production process; however, the project—including planning, composition, direction, and editing—was crafted as a cohesive original video work. © Taisho Shin.
Is there some jank? Yep. Still there. Given the consistency of his character and vehicle designs, I expect that those were generated seperately and then reused as references for the composite shots. Voices were nothing I hadn't heard before; machine translation likely used for generating the subtitles too, explaining some of the tonal oddity in the dialog.
And this guy's an Anglophone who did a pilot.
This is what you can currently do.
Also janky, but you can tell this is already comparable with what the studios in Japan pump out season on season; it's already on the verge of making that business case of cheap and fast animation obsolete and forcing those studios back into higher-end work that takes longer due to quality control to continue justifying their existences, much like the OVA boom did decades ago.
Yet here one guy has a complete pitch for a series or film. The other has a pilot. Not some storyboards. Not a manga chapter. Not some concept pieces and a summary of a light novel or webcomcs. A fully animated pitch trailer or pilot episode, ready for throwing at studios, who can then take what he likely has as his production bible and then immediately accelerate to series or film production.
This, right here, demonstrates at least months and likely years of saved production time purely by showing the prospective production committee what the finish work looks like- and those designs are so friendly to merchandising that you know they'd sell if the full series/film is good and satisfies its audience.
You will have to reckon with this totally wrecking the established film/TV/animation industry within a decade, such that the only alternative that will be viable will be considered "artisinal" and thus solely at the sufferance of patronage to finance their production because it's already this good and only getting better. Expect SI to get incorporated into commercial animation workflows deeply at all stages within a few years, and from there what's already happening in books, comics, and games will come in full force for film and TV.
