YouWare founder Ming Chaoping has come out with another new product, and this time it's aimed at AI short dramas. The tool, called AI做短剧 (AI Zuo Duanju, literally 'AI makes short dramas'), lets you toss a script at the AI and have it break the story into episodes, organize characters, scenes, and props, and then generate storyboards and prompts. Don't have a script? You can start from a single creative idea.
The characters, scenes, and props the AI extracts are automatically saved to an asset library, so they can be pulled straight into shots, storyboards, and timelines later. Besides short dramas, the tool also handles comic-style dramas and ads.
But despite its name, it's not yet at the point where you type in a sentence and get a finished film. In hands-on testing, you can already batch-export storyboard videos, but features like 'project progress' are still locked, and there's no visible way to top up credits.
The big players are already moving in. Alibaba is beta-testing ManClaw, and Tencent Video is testing WorkSolo. According to the China Netcasting Services Association, out of roughly 128,000 micro-dramas that launched in the first quarter of this year, more than 95% were AI-produced. Short-drama production is rapidly going all-in on AI.