Where The Robots Grow

Where The Robots Grow is an 88-minute animated feature film written and directed by Tom Paton and produced by AiMation Studios, made in the UK in association with Pigeon Shrine Consultancy. It was released free on YouTube on 17 October 2024 and also listed on Plex. It was billed as the first original AI feature film and was the first release from AiMation Studios.

AiMation says the film was made with generative AI, motion capture and other CGI. Paton's method, which the studio calls "aiMation", uses AI visualisation and AI-generated virtual production to bring effects work forward in the schedule so actors join later, with human artists staying in the loop. One write-up names Adobe Firefly and Stable Diffusion, and the YouTube upload tags Runway, Sora, Luma, Kling and Minimax, but no page says which tool did what. ElevenLabs, in a customer story, says lead actor Taylor Clarke-Hill voiced several characters through its voice changer and that its sound-effects tool supplied ambient audio. Credits list visual effects by BigTooth Studios, with Nicole Bartlett voicing Pop and N.A.N.A., Lee Preston as Number Two, and Cory and Olivia Teplizki as Young Cru and Little Miss.

Paton describes himself in a podcast interview as a former VFX artist who has worked in film for about 20 years, as a writer, director and producer. He says nine people made the film in 90 days, and that "the film gets made in the edit": the team began from a script, gathered matching material, cut a rough version and revised it from notes. ElevenLabs reports that the same film would now take about eight weeks with four people. Coverage put the cost at roughly $8,000 a minute. AiMation is a company of Pigeon Shrine, which Paton leads as chief executive.

On release, Paton chose to go independent rather than take a distributor's proposed early-2025 deal, and the film went onto AiMation's own YouTube channel after, he says, larger creators hesitated over AI backlash. Tech coverage treated the free release as a showcase for investors and Paton called it "our Toy Story moment". ElevenLabs says AiMation is developing 25 more films and a pay-per-view platform, and Paton's interview describes a closed-beta app for it.

Reception was divided. A Sci-Fi Radio review on 22 October 2024 gave it 4.5 out of 5 and found the dialogue "painfully bad", saying the film "offers nothing beyond its novelty". Plex shows a low audience rating, and IMDb's user score was 4.8 at the time of that review. Commentary also questioned the "fully AI" label, since the process is hybrid, and the "first" claim: a commenter under Nerdly's video review points to earlier AI features, and a Forbes correction (reported in search results, not read directly) names DreadClub: Vampire's Verdict. Its significance, in the coverage, is as an early test of whether a small team using generative tools can deliver a full-length animated feature.