Executive producer Simone Ferretti and director Darin Stewart told the AI Creator Day crowd they pitched Artlist with no concept and no script. They walked out with more than they asked for.
“Within 48 hours they say yes to not only one single series, but they say yes to three, with only one caveat. The first episode had to be out within 3 weeks and a half,” Ferretti said.
The result was “The Arc,” five episodes of about 15 minutes each. A small team pulled from television and music videos built each one in two weeks.
The turning point came with episode three. The team split each script into page blocks and generated them in parallel instead of moving through a traditional shoot-then-post pipeline. “Everyone can prompt, everyone can direct, everyone can edit, really allowed us to divide and conquer,” Stewart said.
By the finale, the new workflow paid off. “Our fifth episode is our longest episode. It’s 20 minutes, and we were able to do that in the shortest amount of time period by switching up our workflow,” he said.
The format lets the story bend late, too. “If people love a character, hate a character, we can kill them last minute like we decided to do,” Stewart said.
The budget looks different depending on where you sit. “$15,000 in Seedance credits, which is a lot of money in the AI world, but in traditional, it’s not,” he said.
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TheWrap and What’s Trending presented AI Creator Day 2026 at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles on Sept. 29. Wispr Flow was the official voice partner, and its Notetaker captured the quotes in this story.
