Henry Daubrez

A kid from Vottem, raised on Don Bluth

Henry Daubrez grew up in Vottem, near Liège in Belgium, on Don Bluth, early 90s anime and Studio Ghibli, and on kids-on-bikes films like Explorers and The Goonies^[6][11][1]. The moment that pointed him at visual effects was a Lord of the Rings bonus DVD about Weta Digital^[6][19]. He studied computer graphics and 3D, taught himself digital painting, and did a CGI internship at a video game studio in France before moving into web design, in the days of HTML4 and Flash, back in Belgium^[5]. Muse by Clios tells a slightly different start, with a computer science course at a local college that he didn't enjoy; neither account names a school^[6].

Thirteen years at Dogstudio

He spent thirteen years at Dogstudio, the digital studio founded in Namur that later opened in Chicago, rising from head of design to CEO and becoming a partner^[5][9]. Its clients included Microsoft, The New York Times, Tomorrowland, Hulu, Adobe, Supercell, Expo 2020 Dubai and Zoox^[5][9][8]. In 2018 SXSW listed him as a mentor from Dogstudio^[32]. When Dogstudio joined the global agency DEPT in May 2022, he stayed on to lead it as partner and CEO/CCO, and by May 2025 he was also DEPT's global VP of creative innovation and design^[9][10][6].

When I entered the digital industry 20 years ago, I secretly hoped one day to find my way into film.

Henry Daubrez^[4]

Falling into the noise

He found generative AI around 2021, through VQGAN in the Wombo app, then Disco Diffusion and Stability's tools^[5][4]. In 2022 he started a story called The Light Within with Midjourney v4, then shelved it^[5]. By October 2023 he was on stage at the KIKK Festival in Namur with a talk called Coming of A(I)ge, about two years of adventures with generative AI^[8]. Around the same time he moved from Belgium to Salt Lake City, Utah^[6][1].

At Dogstudio/DEPT he has described leading an AI-assisted film for Coca-Cola, built with ComfyUI and custom LoRAs on a brief to use as many AI technologies as possible^[5][6]. The AI LIVE team worked with him on Coca-Cola projects in those early days^[33][1]. The film's title and year could not be confirmed for this page.

Kitsune, made over the holidays

In December 2024 he got early access to Google's Veo 2^[5]. A month later, on 16 January 2025, he released Kitsune, a five-minute love story between two lonely souls, a red fox and a spirit fox, made over the holidays with every shot generated by Veo 2 text-to-video^[11]. It took about 5,000 to 7,000 generations to arrive at 1,700 curated sequences, and his stated aim was warmth and nostalgia, not the cold, clinical feel of so many AI films^[11].

BANISHED followed in February, again 100% Veo 2 for the shots, with ElevenLabs voices and Udio music, a tale somewhere between Monte Cristo and The Pied Piper that took a few hundred hours^[12]. In March 2025 he introduced the KIDD-0 cinematic universe, the masked kid who still runs through his work^[13].

Electric Pink and Google

Then Google asked him to make a film for Google I/O 2025, with carte blanche^[14]. Electric Pink is a coming-of-age self-portrait about his own creative wiring, from the fuzzy nostalgia of childhood to the full HD chaos of the present^[14]. He built it from Imagen 3 still frames, which he retouched heavily, then animated each scene with Veo 2, using first-frame to last-frame interpolation as those separate tools were converging into Flow^[14]. In June 2025 it screened at Tribeca in Behind the Lens: AI Filmmaking with Flow from Google, alongside work by Dave Clark and Junie Lau^[15].

On 3 September 2025 Google Labs named him its first filmmaker in residence, working directly with the Flow team, mentoring artists in its Flow Sessions pilot and starting an interactive Flow project, The Enchanted Door, in which viewers choose what happens after a character finds a mysterious archway^[3][4]. KIKK Festival's October 2026 programme describes it as a year he spent as Resident Filmmaker^[7]. In November 2025 he returned to The Light Within and made a two-minute concept trailer in six days, with early access to Nano Banana Pro and Veo 3.1 in Flow; it is now listed as an animated feature in development^[16][7].

Overgrown

His most personal film came out on 21 July 2026. Overgrown, a 13-minute short that he calls a hand-painted meditation on chronic resilience, follows a young woman whose body is overtaken by a silent floral plague and a stranger who teaches her to turn it into a rhythm of resilience^[18][17]. In his director statement he calls it a visual distillation of a lifetime lived alongside cancer and chronic illness, and says he is a survivor himself, currently in remission^[18]. For years he had also made portraits with cancer patients^[18][19]. The teaser had gone out in February, in consideration for the 2026 Tribeca Festival^[17].

We don't move on from our history; we learn to wear it.

Henry Daubrez^[18]

Junkyard King

Junkyard King began as a test of Seedance 2^[1]. Henry never does research for its own sake; he always keeps a real story running behind his experiments^[1]. Chapter 0: The Pink Edge, released on 17 March 2026, introduced Artie, a geeky teenager obsessed with VHS tapes, samurai movies and late-night mysteries, who plays detective after several teens go missing and finds a katana hidden in an abandoned junkyard^[20]. On AI LIVE episode 118 it drew 14 straight 1s from the live chat^[34], and in May Wonder Studios picked it for Wonder TV's first five hand-picked filmmakers^[26].

The raw material is public domain, the legend of King Arthur and its sword, but he writes every episode himself and borrows only the codes people already recognise^[1]. The setting is the childhood he grew up in, somewhere between the 80s and the 90s; the early descriptions say 1980s and the later ones early 90s, and details like Artie's yellow Walkman come straight from his own memories^[1][20][22]. Chapter 1: Training, in June, was made with invideo Agent One, which he said shifted his focus from prompt engineering to direction, camera, pacing and dialogue^[21].

I don't like just doing R&D to do R&D. I like to have a project behind, so that I can build up something.

Henry Daubrez^[1]

A world premiere on AI LIVE

Chapter 2: The New Guy had its world premiere on AI LIVE Creator Sessions #5 on 26 August 2026^[1][22]. It runs 15 minutes, took about six weeks, or seven to eight weeks of work counting his first ever collaborator, Julie Wieland, and costs him around $1,000 a finished minute^[1]. invideo partners on the season, which is planned at nine episodes counting episode zero, with three seasons outlined^[1]. Straight after the premiere, host Chris Branch called it probably the best animation he had ever seen made with AI^[1].

On the same show Henry shared his screen and opened up the whole production: the script marked up scene by scene, an asset bible with a sheet for every state of every character, the invideo agent made to show its prompt and references before it generates, and the ElevenLabs trick that voice-changes seven minutes of dialogue in one pass^[1]. Chapter 3: The Other Side followed on 7 October, sixteen minutes that take Artie, Kai and Socket through the gate into Avalon to find Emily; its end card credits invideo Agent Two, and The FWA lists it^[23][30].

ODD KID, and the worlds around it

On 26 June 2026 he launched ODD KID, a studio for original films, series and worlds, with a 45-second showreel and a tagline: Original worlds. Impossible films. New tools, old taste^[24][36][7]. It produces Junkyard King^[22]. Between main episodes he posts Fragments, 30 to 45-second stories with a start and an end that build lore for KIDD-O, White Rabbit and Dead Normal^[1][27][41]. In September he launched PINK STATIC, a fictional band for Artie and Kai, and posted a vertical Junkyard King music video; later that month The Cycle tried a new style altogether^[28][38][39]. In October he vibe-coded Junkyard King Arena, a free browser brawler set in the show's world^[29][40].

He has also been named a judge of the Formula E x Google Cloud Creators Challenge^[38], spoken at Sundance Collab with a talk called No, Generative AI Doesn't Kill Creativity^[31], and returned to KIKK in October 2026 with Hot or Slop?^[7]. His view is that studios and streamers now want people who can tell a story, not people with the biggest followings, and that they expect a clean chain of title that traces every asset back to a person; he is developing a feature film on that basis^[1].