From consumer products to character-driven series, IvyBears founder and CEO Dr. Kaan Haylaz presented at MipJunior what he dubbed his 'reverse flywheel strategy' for his brand-turned-content hit YouTube show A theater and film studies’ graduate, it was eventually Kaan Haylaz’s lifelong love for gummies that led him to commercial success, and the birth of the ‘IvyBears‘ vitamins brand and IP. Later, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was mainly the ‘Ninja Turtles’… until Pixar launched ‘Toy Story’ and animation changed permanently from hand-drawn 2D cels to fully digital 3D imagery.” Yet in all these success stories, Haylaz underlined that traditional entertainment companies typically create characters, build an audience and subsequently commercialize that audience through consumer products and merchandise.
Not because entertainment was an afterthought, but because life gave me a deeply personal reason to start with the products.” From the start, turning his gummies into super-powered heroes, and mirroring these characters on both labels and animated narratives was in fact at the foundation of Haylaz’s strategy. The entertainment and the consumer product are no longer two separate businesses. They become parts of the same universe.” For the CEO and founder of Malta-based Moontrail Animation Studios, taking this reverse approach means IvyBears can already benefit from an established international retail infrastructure through which our characters can reach consumers, as Moontrail and IvyBears characters continue to develop into a multi-IP animation studio.
Which still meant for Haylaz crafting quality content, based on impactful characters kids could relate to. When you create a character, you look for very unique traits that people can still relate to, while making sure the characters complement each other. When I thought of the IvyBears, the one thing I definitely wanted to avoid was another set of “cute or fluffy” characters that were too predictable.
I see IvyBears as the ‘A-Team’ meets ‘Angry Birds’. A group of very distinctive characters with unique traits: they stand for good, but love to punish the bad guys, hence their not-really-cute but super-confident attitude.” To bring his characters to life, Haylaz relied on AI tools, guided by human talents, in an approach he discussed openly. AI is a tool in the filmmaker’s hands.
At Moontrail, creative direction, storytelling, emotional decisions and artistic judgment remain purely human responsibilities. We are not trying to eliminate artists from the filmmaking process. We are trying to eliminate many of the financial but also technical barriers that have historically prevented independent creators from bringing ambitious ideas to life.” As he framed it, this approach allowed Moontrail to greatly increase production speed and reduce costs, producing 12-minute animated epsiodes in approximately two weeks.
Most of our crew have a storytelling or film background, like myself. What historically could require millions in upfront financing before an audience even had the opportunity to discover it can now be developed, produced, published and tested much more independently.” For Haylaz, the biggest revolution isn’t that AI makes animation faster. It’s that AI makes independent filmmaking economically achievable on an entirely different scale.
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