36 Hours, 100 Masterpieces: I Witnessed a "No One Drawing" Animation Contest in Hangzhou
On June 12th, in Hangzhou's Xihu Yichuang Town, a “World's Greatest Martial Arts Tournament” for AI animation creators kicked off.
With a 36-hour limit plus non-stop closed-door production, this TapTV Arena 「AI Animation Hackathon · Hangzhou Station」, hosted by TapNow, attracted 111 teams and over 300 creators. The event provided ample computing power on site and set up a prize pool of up to 600,000 RMB.
Animation contests are not rare, but one of this scale, with such a tight schedule and gathering the most cutting-edge AI image creators — such an event must not lack stories.
Out of curiosity, Animation Academic was also invited to observe and conduct interviews on site. For traditional animation, completing a short film with a complete narrative and good visuals in 36 hours is almost impossible.
Yet in this competition, a large number of works broke this “limit”, with finished films generally far exceeding the 200-second requirement. At the award ceremony, many works surprised well-known directors and judges alike.
01 What kind of animation can be made in 36 hours with AI?
Arriving at the venue, the first thing I noticed was the lights that never went out throughout the night. Outside the hall, two rows of white tents set up temporarily for rest were particularly eye-catching, with staff on shift at designated points and medical personnel patrolling on site.
But when I actually walked into the creative zone, the atmosphere surprised me — it wasn't as tense and exhausted as I had imagined; the contestants mostly looked focused and composed.
Most participants formed teams of three, with extremely diverse backgrounds: young animators and film industry professionals, students from various universities across the country, AI creators who came from overseas, and the youngest participant, a 9-year-old child.
For me, the most novel thing upon entering was that as an animation competition, you almost never saw anyone “drawing” — no CG software keyframing interfaces on the screen, no dense buttons, models, tracks, or layers.
Instead, people were organizing nodes, writing prompts, and adjusting camera angles on TapNow's 「Infinite Canvas」. Several teams even completed the entire workflow from script to image generation using only TapNow Agent.
The moment the countdown reached zero, applause from the contestants for themselves filled the air.
The three-person teams I contacted mostly adopted a similar division of labor. Everyone participated in camera work and video generation, but each had a focus: the core director was responsible for early-stage creativity, script, and art style, controlling the overall direction; one person focused on generating shots, good at writing and iterating prompts; another excelled in editing and post-production.
The main reason the atmosphere wasn't tense was the high efficiency of AI animation creation: the cycle of output and revision was extremely compressed, significantly reducing the cost of trial and error.
On TapNow's 「Infinite Canvas」 working interface, rapid iteration was achieved by connecting nodes, switching models, and adjusting prompts. Creation was no longer confined to a linear process; at any time, one could “piece together” and “restructure”.
But would the creativity of animators be weakened or outsourced to AI?
The answer from the scene was no. In the most core creative and narrative aspects, they said they still did it themselves.
Participant Shiwai was a representative example. He had worked as a director in traditional live-action film and TV for many years, was once part of the FilmHurricane team, and is now a TapTV signed artist. His work The Falling Little Green Man was inspired by an urban legend he read in a magazine in his childhood. During the scriptwriting process, only occasionally when the logic was fuzzy or the structure was unbalanced did he consult AI as a “script doctor”.
The Falling Little Green Man tells the story of two idle friends exploring an urban legend. As they keep watching and waiting, amid ordinary old-friend conversations, the short film subtly shifts from a realistic tone to absurd fantasy: the strange “little green man” that suddenly jumps out in front of a flashing traffic light versus an uncontrollable real life — which one is the more worthwhile “reality”?
Shiwai designed the characters with a three-head body proportion, using a roughly sketched, simple line style with watercolor wash backgrounds. The yellow-gray dominant palette creates a strong visual contrast with the bright “little green man”. The visual style appears naive but is highly unified, fitting the creative theme of “urban anomaly”.
Notably, Shiwai had never studied animation production before; he didn't draw a single line throughout, completing the entire short by writing and iterating prompts on TapNow.
Another creator, Shanzhu, focused her work 《Forgery》 on the abuse of AI: a girl is ostracized and misunderstood due to maliciously forged content, and the loss of control over the digital world gradually erodes her reality.
As a full-time AI creator, Shanzhu has produced several AI videos with tens of millions of views and has been selected for international film festivals including Busan International Film Festival and FIRST青年电影节. But she also acknowledged that technical standards and ethical norms urgently need to be improved in the AI era.
Notably, Forgery adopted a somewhat “anime” style, closely related to her animation background. During the creative process, she still retained the habit of communicating with teammates using hand-drawn stick figure storyboards.
To ensure the uniqueness and distinctiveness of the work's style, she not only repeatedly refined the character design and line thickness but also invested a lot of effort in color design.
Early on, she and her team spent a lot of time establishing a color tone for each scene and placed it as a reference node on the canvas for generation. “Sometimes I dreamed about the color palette.”
Several works left a particularly deep impression on me: **Best Director Award: Calm Response Team KILL A. ** This team was also the champion of the previous Beijing station. The short film centers on a “twin relationship”, telling a story of self-struggle and mental fragmentation.
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Strong light and shadow contrasts and uneasy camera language intensify the “maddening” narrative tension; the fight sequences are particularly striking, delivering a strong visual impact.
**Student Special Award: Wuxiang Feitu 05:29:84. ** Using a “meta-game” loop structure, the film portrays a character gradually realizing they are in a cycle in daily life, and that their so-called “rebellion” might also be a preset mechanism.
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The work excels in delicate facial expression portrayal, strongly drawing the audience in. From brushing teeth to clocking in, psychological horror is felt through seemingly ordinary actions.
**Bronze Award: Caotai Banzi Next Time for Sure. ** Three contestants from Peking University, all engineering students, used wool felt stop-motion aesthetic to tell the story of a slime-like unknown creature grotesquely born from people always saying “next time for sure”.
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It creates a contrast between lighthearted humor and deep reflection, shifting between microscopic and macroscopic perspectives, making you smile while leaving much to ponder.
Song Wen, founder of FIRST青年电影节, as a judge, specifically mentioned at the award ceremony: “In this evaluation, about one-third of the works focused on workplace and social issues. I hope to see more works with empathy for society in the future.”
This hackathon also reflects the subtle shift in current AI image creation trends.
From the heartwarming short 《Paper Phone》 that resonated with many on the Qingming theme, to the short 《Sign》 that garnered tens of millions of plays and won recognition from Guo Fan — these phenomenal AI works born on the TapNow platform are no longer just flashy visual spectacles; they are beginning to pay attention to reality and reflect society.
The creator's expression is beginning to become the true dividing line for works.
02 The “Relations of Production” Are Changing
Notably, whether the stunning shorts that emerged at this AI animation hackathon or the blockbuster hits like Sign that shook the industry — behind many seemingly very mature works, the creators have often embraced AI for less than a year, sometimes only in the last six months.
Shiwai once lamented that in the traditional film and TV industry, even for long-time practitioners, making a short about one's own story is very luxurious given the barriers of funding, team, schedules, etc.
For him, starting AI image creation with TapNow, AI is more like a “more controllable camera”. It doesn't replace the creator's thinking and expression, but greatly reduces the obstacles to creation. Ideas that were previously stuck at the execution level can now be quickly validated and generated, without having to “beg” others everywhere.
The WildFrame team I met on site is another example. The director graduated from art school and then worked in advertising, but the dream of telling his own story was always stirring. At the beginning of the year, he decided to leave his job and set up a studio, using AI to rapidly build his own sci-fi worldview and try to incubate original IP.
Making a film no longer required risking everything — it could even be quite fun. Their entry 《Reset》 was inspired by a game of Turtle Soup he played. When using TapNow Agent, he jokingly said he treated AI like a “buddy”, chatting sentence by sentence to easily complete repetitive tasks like asset organization and batch referencing.
In this 36-hour hackathon, nearly a hundred teams produced highly finished AI animation shorts. This output is not only due to powerful models but also thanks to the creation platform.
Traditional animation production is labor-intensive; the pipelines before, during, and after are intricately connected. TapNow, with its world-first Infinite Canvas image workflow, breaks this limitation and single-handedly changes the industry's working paradigm. It supports calling multiple models like SeeDance, Midjourney, Banana, etc., and uses nodes as the core, allowing character designs, backgrounds, storyboards, and video materials to coexist in the same space, ready to be dragged, dismantled, referenced, and modified at any time.
For example, in a traditional workflow, if you need to change a character's appearance in a specific shot during the editing stage, you must go back to the earlier stages, rework it, export, and re-synthesize. But at the Hangzhou hackathon, contestants could simply screenshot the part to be modified, place it on the canvas, connect it to the reference node, describe the requirement in natural language, and regenerate the corresponding clip.
The day after the competition ended, TapNow officially released the Agent Native Creative OS. It introduces a custom skill repository, unlimited context memory, and canvas awareness, turning the experience creators accumulate while using AI into personalized, reusable skills.
From local files to collaboration tools, the Agent can seamlessly access the creation scene, making creation no longer confined to a chat box. These capabilities together help creators connect the stages of inspiration collection, world-building, project management, and content production, gradually building their own aesthetic memory and creative system.
This major version update by TapNow means the launch of the world's first AI-native image Agent ecosystem. From inspiration generation, brainstorming, to script generation, everything is completed under the full-process collaboration of the Agent, while supporting real-time team collaboration and self-developed skills, and also connects with external ecosystems like Google / Lark, allowing creators to complete the entire project landing on one platform.
In fact, the TapTV Arena global creative tour has already landed in San Francisco, Beijing, and Hangzhou, with works taken to Cannes and MIT. It is planned to hold its next event at Akihabara in Tokyo, Japan, at the end of the month, themed 「Snake · Rat · Scorpion」.
More and more traditional animators, film and TV professionals, and cross-border creators are being drawn in, experiencing the possibilities of the future firsthand.
Online, TapNow builds a video community and creator ecosystem through TapTV: aggregating quality works, open canvases, transparent prompts and workflows, while continuously launching creator support and incubation programs.
03 The Turning Point of AI Animation Is the Creator
Now that the doubt “Can AI make animation?” has become a false proposition, the next turning point of AI animation falls back on the creators themselves.
A few months ago at the Beijing hackathon, people were still focusing on AI model capabilities, image quality, workflow maturity, and work completion. But at this Hangzhou station, these have gradually become the basic configuration for creators.
This time, the core focus of judges and audiences began to shift to deeper dimensions: What does the creator really want to express? Do they have a unique perspective and aesthetic system? Do they show distinct authorship?
The day after the time-limited creation ended, several themed roundtable forums were held on site, inviting well-known practitioners, festival founders, and university professors to share and discuss the future of AI animation from perspectives like technology, aesthetics, and IP.
Among them, the forum 「AI Era: Originality and Authorship」 left the deepest impression on me.
Screenwriter Jin Jin of Good Reunion (also a hackathon participant) noted that one major bottleneck for “good scripts in domestic film and TV” is the high decision-making cost in the industry.
Scripts are often constrained by specific tags, data metrics, and internal platform meetings. Even if professional screenwriters have novel ideas, it's hard to convince clients to take on the risk. AI offers more opportunities, allowing “one to showcase the content they really want to make at a lower cost”.
She believes that to create high-quality content, the relationship between AI and creators should be one of continuous discussion and mutual “nitpicking”. The ceiling of the final work still lies with the creator.
Another guest, TapTV signed director Wenkai, who spans comics, animation, film, and more, believes that many people misunderstand “authorship”:
Beyond subjective expression intentions, “authorship” also has strong objective factors — it is a product of life environment, production conditions, and tool limitations; it is something that “cannot help but be expressed”.
In his view, the creative thinking of AI animation may be more like a manga artist who “one person is an army”, rather than traditional film. Creators need to step out of the established thinking of traditional industry experience and discover originality belonging to this era beyond the medium.
When chatting with animation creators on site, I always ended up asking this question.
Shiwai said, first, one must truly master AI tools, just as a photographer must understand their camera.
But more importantly, not being held hostage by technology — keep thinking about real life and maintaining keen observation of details. This will never become outdated. “As long as the final consumers of the work are still humans, these abilities won't change.”
Shanzhu's answer was more “simple and direct”: “If I were recruiting for our team, I would prioritize people with an animation background.”
In her view, the AI era is a golden opportunity for animators to shine. Animation graduates are “all-rounders”: they master audiovisual language, understand drawing styles, have a keen perception of color, and possess the wild imagination of “ACG” (anime, comics, games). All these become clear advantages with AI.
In the past, the worry that an animator's “style isn't mainstream enough” is no longer a problem — AI doesn't favor any style; it embraces all kinds of aesthetics.
Beyond the model iterations that compete on parameters and precision, AI creation ecology has shown a warmer side this year. TapNow has gradually formed a community atmosphere of free exchange and mutual inspiration, supporting creators to keep playing together over the long term.
In March, TapNow launched the 「Ten Thousand Parallel Universes」 short film competition, setting up a special prize pool up to a million level, encouraging creators to build complete worldviews and narrative segments, connecting the full chain from “trailer — serial content — IP incubation”. The full copyright and derivative rights of all original IP belong to the creators themselves.
In May, the platform brought a batch of outstanding works born on TapNow to the Cannes International Film Festival, discussing the future of AI images with global filmmakers on site, and helping creators connect with overseas production companies.
Not long ago, TapNow also co-branded with the second edition of the wildly popular “Bilibili AI Creation Competition”, launching the 「Universe Alliance: One-Click Triple Universe」 track, calling for AI shorts from around the world, with a total prize pool of 3.6 million, a 600,000 prize pool for this track, providing starting computing token support for participants, with a chance to share 400,000 official bonus + 8,000 official traffic.
Currently, AI animation creation has not yet formed absolute classics and barriers, unlike traditional animation which has a pyramid-like hierarchical structure where the top is unreachable.
In the past, cultivating an animation director often took ten years, and gaining any industry influence was even harder. Today, more talented creators can be seen at an earlier stage.
AI has significantly lowered the threshold. At a new starting point, animation creators are running even harder. This mountain is far from its peak.