China Premieres First Long-Form AIGC Drama 'After Journey to the West'
Mango TV and Hunan TV premiered China's first long-form AIGC drama series, 'After Journey to the West,' featuring 30 episodes at 40 minutes each produced without human actors. The production cut planning-to-launch time by 70% compared to traditional 3D animation and cost a fraction of equivalent live-action S-tier dramas. This project marks a shift in generative AI video production from short experimental clips toward long-form, commercial television broadcasting. It also demonstrates how AI-generated content can diversify platform demographics, attracting a significantly higher proportion of new male viewers. The production pipeline progresses from text-to-image character and environment design to image-to-video generation, with human directors, screenwriters, and artists managing creative direction and workflow integration. Additionally, it is the first series to adopt a real-time production, review, and broadcast model ('边审边播') under updated Chinese broadcasting regulations.
## BACKGROUND
AIGC video production typically relies on multi-stage pipelines that turn text descriptions into images before synthesizing dynamic motion frames via image-to-video models. While early AI video tools were constrained to short clips due to character consistency and rendering challenges, recent workflow platforms allow production teams to scale these pipelines for long-form narrative series.