What that support looks like on the ground shows up in how Liu and Qiao actually built “Primordia,” one of the program’s standout projects. Liu worked as a concept designer on film and television productions, including several theatrically released Chinese films, translating screenplays into images so a production designer would have something concrete to discuss with the director. He and Qiao stayed creative partners the whole time, at one point hauling equipment to an island together to shoot a student film. “Primordia” confines its story to a cluster of star systems the pair call the Ore, home to dozens of inhabited planets and a war over resources mined from ancient creatures. A frontier boy named Jesse rescues a fugitive military officer named Rook, and the bargain between them pulls both into empire, war and the secret of Jesse’s own origins.
Still from “Primordia,” created by Liu and Qiao
Image courtesy of “Primordia”
The pair chose a series format over the AI shorts that have become common online, betting that “Primordia’s” characters and history needed more than 10 or 15 minutes to land. Liu says he wants the project to have the texture of something “that could genuinely live on a platform and continue to develop.” Production runs through TapNow’s own tools, including an agent system Liu uses to turn conversational shot descriptions, camera moves and blocking into instructions the underlying models can act on. Qiao says the creators lean on the same system to organize the world and screenplay, using it less as a decision-maker than a collaborator that offers structure and pushback on writing that still starts with them.
Tamar AI and HappyHorse will co-host a program at the Venice Production Bridge built around that slate. The panel “AI + Cinema: The Next Generation of Storytelling and Creativity,” runs Sept. 4 at Spazio Incontri in the Hotel Excelsior, with the president of CILECT Europe, a senior executive from Italy’s Rainbow Group and representatives from both companies. A curated screening of selected films from the 10,000 Parallel Universes initiative, “New Voices in AI Cinema,” including the three HappyHorse-backed titles, follows Sept. 7 at Sala Pasinetti in the Palazzo del Casinò.
The clearest sign of where TapNow wants all of this to go is Glanze, a streaming platform the company is preparing to launch out of the 10,000 Parallel Universes initiative and power with TapNow’s production tools. Every title on Glanze starts as what the company calls a Glance, a first-look preview that can grow into full episodes, seasons and an expanding world audiences return to; viewers can press play immediately, reserve what comes next or dig into the places and artifacts behind a story. TapNow describes the model as pairing the serialized, ongoing relationship between creators and audiences familiar from Japanese manga with AI production tools that cut the cost and complexity of building out an ambitious world over time.
The web version of Glanze launches Sept. 4 with more than 40 series Glances live and five series beginning official serialization; a mobile app follows in late October with more than 30 series serialized and over 100 series Glances to browse.
