Massive Studios plans three free AI-made Christmas shorts

Three Christmas animated shorts built with artificial intelligence tools will be released free on Christmas Eve, with a first trailer due over Thanksgiving weekend in November.

The slate was unveiled at the Toronto International Film Festival by director Reza Sixo Safai, writers Paul A. Kaplan and Mark Torgove and producer Todd Garner, The Hollywood Reporter reported. The project pairs Massive Studios with CapCut, the content creation platform, to develop the three films for a free end-of-year release. The announcement was made during a festival panel discussion featuring all four men.

Garner originated the Christmas concept and brought it to the group. Safai, co-founder of Massive Studios, will direct all three shorts. Kaplan and Torgove, the writing team behind The Garfield Movie, wrote the scripts for the trio. Garner will handle producing duties.

Massive Studios is described as a filmmaker-led studio working across film, television, animation and branded entertainment. Its model combines traditional filmmaking craft with AI tools. For these shorts, that includes Video Studio and Seedance 2.5, an AI video generation model that creates moving images from text and other prompts.

The production did not start with software. Artists first produced hand-drawn designs for the characters and worlds. Actor performances were then used to establish proportions, expressions, costumes, textures and personalities. Only after that human foundation was set was technology used for motion.

That order matters for a general viewer. In simple terms, people still design how the characters look and act. The AI tools then help turn that work into finished animation. It is a mix of drawing, performance and machine generation, rather than a fully automated process.

The release plan is straightforward. A trailer is scheduled to debut over Thanksgiving weekend in November, the long holiday weekend in the United States that traditionally opens the Christmas season for cinemas and shops. The three completed shorts are then to be made available free on 24 December.

Safai has explored this territory before. He brought a film powered by Sora, OpenAI's text-to-video system, to the Tribeca Film Festival in 2024, according to TIFF. The Toronto panel that launched the Christmas project was organised around filmmaking and social platforms.

For viewers, this means a short wait. One trailer in November. Three small festive stories in December. No ticket or subscription is attached to the Christmas Eve launch.