Kavan the Kid aka Kavan Cardoza

Psychology, then the camera

Kavan Cardoza started out studying psychology at Boise State University, then left because film and photography let him say more^[38]. He went to film school in Florida, which he now calls a waste of time next to what he learned on the job, and moved to Los Angeles to direct music videos for independent and hip-hop artists^[32][1]. Bypass Hollywood reports that the nickname, Kavan the Kid, dates from childhood^[33].

Money was always short, so he did every job himself. He lit, shot and edited, and built sets and costumes in a house in South Central, where he says he would "literally build set pieces from scratch"^[32]. He describes about fifteen years of music videos and then commercials, including work for Island and Atlantic Records, and a reputation as the director who could make a $20,000 or $30,000 budget look three or four times bigger^[1][32]. One public credit from those years is Flood Society's God's Gift in 2017, which names him as director^[42].

I was the set designer, the set builder, I was the cinematographer, the director of photography, the editor.

Kavan the Kid^[1]

Darkness, photographed

Alongside the videos he made surreal self-portrait photography. In 2014 Scene360 introduced him as a Los Angeles music video director and photographer, and over the next five years his pictures were featured by Juxtapoz, Fubiz, Who Killed Bambi?, Beautiful/Decay and others^[38][40]. In a 2019 interview he called 2018 the lowest point of his life and said that making art had saved it, on more than one occasion^[39].

Those pictures became a book, Stay Inside and Don't Let the Dreams Out, which he dates to March 2020; Scene360 had reported a planned date of February 2020^[1][39]. It is full of masks and bandaged faces, and the look runs straight into his later work: in 2024 he turned the book into a surreal short film, and its bandaged faces prefigure the Collector^[21][1]. In 2021 he also released a song of his own, Alright, and directed its CGI-heavy video^[41].

From blobs to Batman

His first AI experiments were early Midjourney images, which he remembers as blobs where he could "kind of see Deadpool"^[32]. By 2024 he was making short concept trailers for franchises he loved, Power Rangers, Spawn, G.I. Joe and Street Fighter among them, while deliberately keeping his own ideas back until the tools could carry them^[22][1].

On 4 December 2024 he released The Batman: A Face of Clay, a ten-minute AI fan film made with Mike J Mitch and Sav in about three weeks, using Midjourney, Kling, MiniMax, Runway Act-One, ElevenLabs and Topaz^[23][24]. It became his most watched video at the time. A few days later Warner Bros had it removed from YouTube and his other channels, followed by a cease and desist letter; Kavan puts it at "four days or something like that", Delirio at five^[1][25]. He never reposted it. The takedown, he says, was a big factor in what came next^[1].

On 1 January 2025 he launched the AI studio Phantom X with Mike J Mitch and Sav^[2]. They took no outside investment, because they wanted to own the company and steer it themselves^[25]. Six weeks later came Star Wars: The Ghost's Apprentice, an eleven-minute fan film about a young Jedi a century after the Skywalker saga, which Forbes headlined as the best Star Wars movie in years^[19][26].

Echo Hunter

His first original film, Echo Hunter, came out on 28 May 2025: a dystopian thriller presented by Arcana Labs and produced by Phantom X, billed as "a SAG-AFTRA approved AI film", with Breckin Meyer, Taylor John Smith and Danielle Bisutti in the cast^[16][27][28]. Its clone hunters never take off their masks. He wrote it that way because the tools of the day, Runway Act-One included, could not yet handle faces and lip-sync^[1].

AI video had no sound then, so he built every effect by hand from his own library and Artlist; the film took about two months^[1]. A prequel, Echo Hunter: A Memory Too Far, followed in September 2025, presented by Kling AI and starring King Bach, and Kling showcased it at MIPCOM in Cannes that October^[17][29]. In between he released a trailer for Untold: The Immortal Blades Saga, a script AVCesar reports he had been developing for more than eight years^[49][50].

I believe sound is 90% of a film.

Kavan the Kid^[1]

Stripping legends to the bones

The Chronicles of Bone began with a question: what if he put the public domain characters everyone knows into one world, stripped them down to the bare basics, and rebuilt them in his own story^[1]? King Arthur, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Tinker Bell, Captain Hook, Captain Nemo and a Frankenstein-like figure called the Collector now share a world ruled for five centuries by the Mordane Empire, a vampire dynasty^[1][30]. He spent six or seven months writing, and all five seasons were finished before production began^[1].

He launched it on Instagram's terms. Six prologues, the first only 90 seconds long, each introduced one character so viewers would care before the season started^[2]. Prologue One arrived on 4 November 2025, and AI LIVE screened it on the weekly show two days later, where its sound design stood out^[7][48]. Prologue Three, The Collector, on 30 December 2025, broke out: it now has 5.7 million views^[6].

A Magnific Original

In February 2026 Freepik, the Malaga company now called Magnific, bought the remaining prologues and the whole of Season One, its first original series made entirely with AI^[30][31]. Kavan keeps 100% of the IP and creative control; the plan is five seasons and more than 40 main characters^[31]. Prologue Four was the first episode billed as a Freepik Original, and from Chapter One in May 2026 every episode carries the Magnific Original label^[9][11].

The audience kept growing. Prologue Five, Captain Hook's story, is his most watched episode at 7.75 million views, and the twelve episodes released so far have passed 45 million between them^[5][3]. The Los Angeles Times featured him that July among the filmmakers taking ByteDance's Seedance into Hollywood, and The Guardian visited the spare bedroom in Playa Vista where he makes the show, describing a lucrative deal with Magnific^[34][35].

Sixteen days, 5am to 11pm

He makes each chapter almost alone, in 16 to 20 days of 5am to 11pm work^[2]. Every character starts as a real costume: for the Collector he bought bandages at CVS, wrapped his own face, added a black hat, a yellow raincoat and black gloves, then iterated the photo in Nano Banana^[1][2]. Starting from a human-made object also documents authorship: his scripts, world book and character designs are registered for copyright, and the name is trademarked^[2].

Every shot in Seedance 2.5 is loaded with up to 50 references, and his ratio of generations to usable shots has fallen from about 90 to 1 on Seedance 2.0 to between 30 and 20 to 1^[2]. Because 2.5 adds music to action shots whatever he prompts, he splits clips into dialogue, effects and music in Moises AI, or cleans them frequency by frequency in RipX DAW^[2]. Music comes from Suno, prompted, as he puts it, like a director's cue sheet^[1][37]. An episode costs tens of thousands of dollars in credits; his low-end estimate for shooting the same thing live action is $10 million or more^[2].

I never would have been able to make this story without it, because no studio would have taken a chance on it.

Kavan the Kid^[2]

What comes next

Season One runs eight chapters, released on the first Tuesday of each month, with the finale due in December 2026^[1][2]. Phantom X now runs five original shows from Kavan, Mike J Mitch, Sav, Aze Alter and Rafa, and joined Fairground Entertainment's AI-only FAST channel in July 2026^[2][44]. He directed Last Recall for Wonder Studios' Beyond the Loop anthology, spoke at Magnific's Upscale conference in San Francisco and at LA Tech Week, and was due at Upscale in Spain in November 2026^{[18][45][46][2]}.

Asked on AI LIVE whether he is a filmmaker or an AI filmmaker, he did not hesitate: "I just consider myself a filmmaker."^[2]