![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/ffcc5f32-1a6e-4539-9f1a-aaad621daa54.jpg\")
The first three-minute video explores the walk that inspired Edvard Munch to paint The ScreamFremantle\u2019s Imaginae Studios<\/p>\nIf you want to see The Scream, you could buy a plane ticket to Oslo, book accommodation, reserve a ticket in advance and possibly queue outside the museum for entry before feeling the impact of the painting.<\/p>\n
Or, you could experience the artwork through an AI-created animation on social media.<\/p>\n
An AI studio has created a video of Edvard Munch\u2019s masterpiece to make art more accessible to Gen Z and millennials.<\/p>\n
The three-minute film zooms into the painting, where the petrified figure walks in the moments before he grips his face in existential dread. Over the moving painting, a voice reads Munch\u2019s haunting description of the walk that inspired him, when the sky turned \u201cblood red\u201d and \u201cflaming tongues\u201d hovered above the \u201cblue-black fjord\u201d.<\/p>\n
The video is the first in a series for social media, Art Awakens, which gives famous artworks motion, audio and context behind their creation.<\/p>\n
Next will be Hokusai\u2019s The Great Wave off Kanagawa, followed by Edward Hopper\u2019s Nighthawks and Vincent van Gogh\u2019s The Starry Night.<\/p>\n
The Arnolfini Portrait, by Jan van Eyck, and Whistler\u2019s Mother, by James McNeill Whistler, will also follow.<\/p>\n
The first three-minute video explores the walk that inspired Edvard Munch to paint The ScreamFremantle\u2019s Imaginae Studios<\/p>\n
Imaginae Studios describes itself as an AI-native studio backed by the production company Fremantle, best known for The X Factor and Britain\u2019s Got Talent.<\/p>\n
James Duffen, chief executive of Imaginae Studios, said: \u201cIf people want to keep art in art galleries, I don\u2019t think many people will see it unfortunately.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd if you\u2019re a lover of art like we are, you want as many people to really experience the joy and the sorrow of all these artworks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Duffen referenced poor-quality AI content on social media, sometimes called \u201cAI slop\u201d or \u201cbrain rot\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are the complete antithesis to that. We\u2019re trying to set a very high creative bar,\u201d he said. \u201cWe wanted to do something both educational and informative.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added that their target demographic was \u201caudiences that know these artworks as cultural reference points \u2014 you know The Scream is the emoji right? \u2014 but perhaps they wouldn\u2019t go into an art gallery to view them. We\u2019re trying to make art more accessible here but doing it in a very new and innovative way.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Painting](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/4dfd365e-e228-43b5-8ee7-1a9a857a45ba.jpg\")
One of several versions of The Scream by MunchPhoto12\/Universal Images Group\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
The video has been released in full on YouTube and promoted on Fremantle\u2019s social media accounts, which typically post trailers for upcoming productions or clips of red-carpet interviews.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to go where the audiences are,\u201d Duffen said. He later added that broadcasters and streamers were not yet commissioning AI content but suspects the market will \u201cevolve\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Voices in the creative industries have been some of the loudest speaking against the use of AI<\/a>, particularly the threat of their work being used to train AI models<\/a> or replace production jobs<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n However, the series\u2019s Spanish film-maker, Hilario Abad, said the methodology was not entirely new to him.<\/p>\n \u201cI feel like I\u2019ve been doing this my whole life,\u201d he said, describing how he would use Windows Movie Maker, PowerPoint and clip art when he was 13 or 14 years old.<\/p>\n To make The Scream video he input the reference image \u2014 Munch\u2019s artwork \u2014 into the AI model, as well as a storyboard he had sketched, then kept prompting until the video was right, tweaking manually using Photoshop as he went.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very playful,\u201d he said, comparing the process to making a comic book. \u201cI think both traditional and this new kind of media can work in dialoging ways. For example, if I had a high-budget movie to make tomorrow I would probably start by making a footprint using AI.\u201d<\/p>\n Having started at the end of January, Abad said AI had not made him quicker. However, he was the only film-maker working on the project.<\/p>\n Although the artworks are all in the public domain, the internal software that Imaginae uses means the AI models cannot train from what Abad inputs.<\/p>\n Duffen said, \u201cFor film-making, for TV, human creativity is always going to be at the heart of it. It\u2019s just generative AI is expanding what is possible.\u201d<\/p>\n He said Imaginae is looking at science or natural history as inspiration for its next project, adding the studio was \u201cspeaking to major broadcasters around the world\u201d.<\/p>\n In a recent annual report, its parent company, RTL Group, reported that Fremantle\u2019s revenue was down 9.4 per cent in 2025, \u201cmainly due to lower revenue from the entertainment business\u201d.<\/p>\n After a strategic review, the report said Fremantle would stop fully financing feature films, focusing instead on smaller acquisitions and the deployment of AI. The software is already being used to \u201cautomate production and post-production workflows\u201d for selected shows on RTL projects in Germany.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you want to see The Scream, you could buy a plane ticket to Oslo, book accommodation, reserve…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":523812,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-523811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/523812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/9edaed9a-5fa6-4e2d-aca1-9902835cf2dc.jpg\")
The series was created by Hilario Abad, a Spanish film-makerFremantle\u2019s Imaginae Studios<\/p>\n