While artificial intelligence has been one of the biggest points of contention in the WGA and the SAG-AFTRA strikes, back in France, Newen Studios has taken a deep dive into AI to deliver daily soaps, as well as source talent and pitch projects in their own metaverse space.
During Mipcom, Newen’s head of innovation, Marianne Carpentier, launched the second edition of the banner’s Meta Pitch Contest. Supported by the Creative Europe Program, the event will see creators pitching their series through an avatar in Newen’s metaverse space before a jury of international producers, distributors, acquisition executives and media professionals. The two finalists will then be invited to Series Mania in Lille for an in-person finale, vying for an audience award. The winner will receive development support.
“Since we created our metaverse in May 2022, we’ve done many things and this Meta Pitch Contest is one of our highlights,” Carpentier tells Variety. After an inaugural edition limited to European participants, the event is being expanded to global applicants who will be presenting their series projects with trailers boasting AI-powered tools.
“The great thing with this Meta Pitch Contest is that it breaks boundaries by enabling people everywhere to pitch their ideas and feel liberated of any type of constraints in doing so wherever they are, through an avatar,” Carpentier says, adding that Newen will benefit from “getting access to cool trailers and marketing material using AI for shows before they’re even produced.”
The project that won last year’s contest, “Hello,” hails from Lithuanian creators and is currently being produced by Aux Singuliers, a French production label owned by Newen Studios. Carpentier described it as a feel-good animated series whose story is told through the perspective of a “little robot vacuum” which forms a special bond with the daughter of the family it lives with. “It’s the first time Newen Studios developed a project like this and we have already found a director for it,” she says.
Along with pitching, Newen has used its metaverse space to host masterclasses with well-known actors as part of its year-long program for acting students in underprivileged areas in Southern France.
The metaverse is a pure post-COVID product that Newen came up with to allow its producers to meet, present things and even sell their projects using their avatars.
The company, which is owned by TF1, has also been using AI on some of France’s best known daily soaps, “Demain nous appartient” and “Plus belle la vie,” which are both produced by Newen Studios labels. The company created an in-house AI tool called Cinetwork, which can process scripts and generates a database for actors and key crew. “These series involve a lot of production constraints and these tools are saving us tremendous time by analyzing the scripts and creating filming schedules based on the availability of actors,” Carpentier says. Though some crew members resisted the idea of being assisted by an AI tool, she says they ultimately realized it freed up some time for them to do more work on the creative aspect of their respective jobs.
“At first everyone was scared,” Carpentier says. “When we told the costume designer that ‘instead of spending the whole day dissecting the script to see which actor is where and with whom, there is a new tool that’s going to do it for you,’ her first reaction was ‘I’m going to lose a day of work!” But very quickly, Carpentier says, “She understood that it gave her so much more time to work on the artistic and focus on things she enjoyed doing.”
Carpentier says these tools have also helped producers working around the clock on soaps to deliver episodes. “The idea is not to have AI write scripts, but rather use it to help writers working on these daily shows to stop doing boring things, like doing charts with the filiation bonds between 40 characters to make sure they don’t have them sleep with their relatives,” she says. “On these shows where everyone has slept with everyone, it’s hard to keep track of.” For actors, AI has also helped by delivering scripts digitally, updating them live and preparing them for each part rather than giving the whole script to every actors.
Carpentier says Newen Studios has also occasionally tapped into deepfakes. The banner used it on “Plus belle la vie,” when an actor tested positive for COVID during the pandemic. Newen was able to use deepfake technology to clone the face of the actor from two scenes and put it on another actor, who was paid for her work on the series. “If we hadn’t been able to use deepfake technology we would have had to stop filming for two weeks or replace the actor,” Carpentier says.
Carpentier said the actor who had COVID gave her permission to clone her face and have another actor replace her for two days. “She was happy not to lose the role and the actor who replaced her was happy because we gave her another part afterwards,” Carpentier says.
Newen is also looking at AI for dubbing, noting that streamers have been using the technology to adapt to each country’s language and release it worldwide for some time. “It makes sense, typically, to do a voiceover in Lithuanian for a documentary we’re going to sell for €1,000 because we’re not going to do a dubbing for that, we’ll use an AI with a synthetic voice and it will work well,” Carpentier says, adding that some companies (which are not part of Newen) are starting to use both real dubbing for the main roles and synthetic voices for supporting parts.
The bottom line, Carpentier says, is that Newen isn’t using AI to cut jobs, but in a “smart way, to expand possibilities, ideas and optimize time.”
“Like everything in life, there’s a flip side to AI — but the more I play with it, the more I realize how useful it is for people in this industry,” Carpentier says. “We should call it augmented intelligence rather than artificial intelligence.”