StoReel, a Chinese platform built around AI-generated vertical dramas, has released Canvas, a tool that takes a script and turns it into a cast, sets, storyboards and finished episodes. TheWrap got early access and spent four days making a spoof of Amazon's hockey romance "Off Campus".
The experiment cost about 11,000 credits, roughly $150, for four minute-long episodes. StoReel puts its own cost at around $50 a minute, compared with about $2,000 a minute for a live-action microseries. Finishing the whole 30-episode script would have cost a few thousand dollars more.
The script itself came from chatbots. ChatGPT declined to write scenes that closely recreated the copyrighted novel and offered an outline instead; Claude produced a 50-page script within minutes. Canvas split it into 146 clips of 10 to 15 seconds, each with a stage-direction prompt of several hundred words and about 10 minutes to render. It refused requests to make characters resemble the real actors, and some characters came out so different that they had to be regenerated at extra cost.
The verdict was mixed. The images were realistic, but performances were wooden, with odd pauses, fixed stares and flat line readings, and the camera sometimes moved in ways that broke the scene. The tool also quietly changed an author's name in one shot, and never flagged that the script was lifted from the novel's plot.
StoReel wants outside creators to make shows with Canvas that can end up on its app, which it calls professional user-generated content, and pays about $150 a minute for work it accepts. Co-founder Angela Yu says around 80% of the catalogue already comes from that creator pool, the target is 100 shows a month, and the model is closer to YouTube than to a traditional studio. Its in-house shows still take up to a month of scripting and a month of production.
Yu says the founders first planned an ordinary microdrama app but found the cost of winning users unsustainable. She says AI output was unwatchable in early 2025 but jumped in quality with Google's Veo 3. The company reports that one AI title cost $4.63 per install against $8 to $10 for its live-action shows, and that seven-day retention across its 80-plus AI originals runs 22% above comparable live-action series. Holywater's chief executive made a similar claim this month, saying engagement on AI shows built from human scripts roughly matches live action. StoReel earns mainly from subscriptions, which start at $19.99 a week or $269 a year in North America.
Yu argues that taste will separate winners once the tools are this capable, and that Chinese audiences are more accepting of AI content than Americans. TheWrap concluded that access to the tool is not enough on its own to make something worth watching.
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