By Gary Symons
TLL Editor in Chief
Advanced artificial intelligence programs from companies like Aquifer Motion are allowing fictional characters to engage directly with their fans, ushering in a new type of licensing.
TLL first covered Aquifer Motion in October last year when the company signed a deal with licensor Cloudco Entertainment to create personalized messages for fans from the company’s Care Bears characters.
Cloudco worked with the ‘instant animation’ company to launch a program called Care Bears Shoutouts (seen in photo at top), an initiative that offers personalized animated video shorts featuring fan-favorite Care Bears characters.
Families and friends can now go online and order personalized video messages from Cheer Bear, Wish Bear, Grumpy Bear, and Tenderheart Bear to celebrate birthdays, milestones, friendships, and other special moments.
The technology is a groundbreaking example of how artificial intelligence, or AI, combined with the ‘virtual influencer’ trend, is changing the game for marketing and licensing.
Essentially, Aquifer Motion allows users to request a shoutout in less than five minutes, and receive the finished animation in less than 48 hours.
The experience is made possible through the revolutionary instant animation technology developed by Aquifer for brands and IP-owners, enabling them to seamlessly onboard their characters and distribute captivating, animated videos, and products across various platforms.
Based in Austin, Texas, Aquifer’s technology now powers some of the most cherished animated characters in the film, television, and entertainment industry. Hasbro’s Transformers, Baby Shark and LOL Surprise are among the early adopters who are using the company’s tech and platform to engage directly with their fan base.
The Licensing Letter predicted this trend in 2020 in its special report on the Rise of the Virtual Influencer. At the time, virtual influencers were relatively static, and while their fans could view them in photos or short videos on social media, the influencers did not have the ability to engage with individual fans.
That’s the bridge that Aquifer Motion, among a few other leaders in the field, has now built to establish a more direct connection between fans and brands.
The company was founded by two tech-minded entrepreneurs who saw the potential in combining augmented reality, virtual reality, and a form of generative AI that quickly creates animated videos using the licensor’s images, plus the text message input by the client.
CEO Chen Zhang came to the company with a background in digital media. She was formerly the COO and co-founder at the startup Part Time Evil, an immersive story studio with a focus on 3D animated videos, augmented and virtual reality experiences. In that role, Zhang also worked on strategy and design for groundbreaking products for Merck, Molina, AT&T, and various other brands big and small. She also worked with the boundary-busting people at DARPA, a US government agency whose sole focus is to develop new and often revolutionary technologies for the Defence Department.
COO Matt Udvari is also a Part Time Evil co-founder and was CEO of that company until he and Zheng launched Aquifer Motion. Prior to that gig, Udvari worked primarily as a video game developer and filmmaker, bringing both technical and storytelling chops to the company.
Zhang says the tech behind Aquifer Motion was developed as the two dived into the world of augmented and virtual reality.
“We quickly saw that not only did this technology help our studio work faster, but that it had much bigger potential to change how animation was created for the broader entertainment industry,” Zhang says.
But technology without a plan to drive revenue results in a failed company, and fortunately for the new venture, Zhang has experience working on launches for major brands, such as Samsung and Under Armour. Rather than trying to create animated messages with their own characters, Aquifer Motion instead followed the licensing route, working with entertainment and character brands that want to create new revenue streams while engaging with their fan base.
Zhang says major studios and IP holders who see the vision of their characters engaging on a personal basis with fans are the company’s ideal clients.
“Licensing is very important for our business,” Zhang says. “We work with marketing teams and consumer products teams at studios. On the consumer products side, brands are always looking for cut new categories of digital products and experiences that have not only big revenue potential, but also grow brand affinity among their audiences and fans.
“The personalized digital products powered by Aquifer represent one example of that,” she adds. “Fans can get a delightful personalized video from their favorite character, where they find other consumer products.”
The company’s generative AI comes in to play in reducing costs and the time it takes to produce the short videos.
“Aquifer does use generative AI to create animated scenes very quickly,” Zhang explains. “The crux of Aquifer’s technology is that it takes dialogue in the form of voice-over audio file or text, analyzes it, then generates an entire scene with the brand’s assets, including shots, character animations, expressions, and lip sync.
“Users can then make changes to the scene and re-generate or we have an API that automatically sends that finished video to a distribution point such as a direct-to-consumer ecommerce website.”
In some cases, videos are ordered from the client’s site, but Aquifer has also worked with the personalized message service Cameo, where it’s Baby Shark videos sit at the top of the charts on Cameo Kids.
Most importantly, Aquifer guarantees that the client has ownership over their assets that are in Aquifer and the videos that are generated, which has helped the company attract new business from clients who are obviously very concerned about anything that would harm their brands. Aquifer appears to have hit that sweet spot between ease and speed to market, while zealously preserving brand integrity.
“The response has been fantastic from the entertainment industry,” Zhang says. “We’re coming at a time where there has been the promise of AI-enabled animation for a long time, but the practical execution wasn’t valuable to brands, either due to trademark/ownership issues or quality issues.
“Aquifer is unique in that we have targeted our solution to the world’s biggest brands and can deliver the efficiency they’re looking for while ensuring that quality and ownership needs are met,” she adds. “We’ve had the opportunity to launch products and content with top brands such as the Care Bears, L.O.L. Surprise, Transformers and there are several other big brand launches on the way in the next few weeks and months.”
The market for personalized messages is large in itself, but Zhang and her partner Matt Udvari are also looking to a future in which they can see AI-generated animation taking a much greater role in our daily entertainment and communications. Long term the company hopes to put animation tools into the hands of individuals at home, who may have stories to tell, but don’t have the ability to create high-quality images and animation.
“Our vision is to enable studios and teams to create animated content and animated digital products instantly,” Zhang explains. “There will never be a replacement for human creativity and storytelling, but our mission is to remove the technical challenges and costs associated with those challenges out of the way.”
Cloudco Launches Shoutouts For Personalized Messages to Fans