In December 2024, Kavan Cardoza, who works as Kavan the Kid, put a Batman fan film on the internet. He had been writing a detective story, switched the lead to Batman and cloned the voices of Robert Pattinson and Jeffrey Wright to carry it.
It became the most-watched thing he had ever posted. On the fifth day, he checked the numbers and the video was gone, along with every copy across his other accounts. Cardoza said in a video interview that YouTube identified Warner Bros. as the claimant.
The timing was deliberate. Cardoza set a hard deadline of December 3 and finished to it. Days later, OpenAI released Sora. Had he waited, he told a panel at the Austin AI Film Festival that March, the film would have been dead on arrival.
Today, Cardoza has a different copyright problem. It concerns something he created himself.
How Kavan The Kid Builds IP Before He Generates The Film
Cardoza makes The Chronicles of Bone, a dark fantasy series he writes, generates, edits, scores and sound designs largely alone, at roughly one episode a month.
He said that the US Copyright Office has registered his scripts and show bible, and approved the copyrights on his character designs. The title is trademarked.
That strategy is deliberate. Cardoza works backward from what he believes the Office will accept. “I’m able to copyright my character designs because they start as real photos,” he said.
Before the Collector, one of the show’s leads, appeared onscreen, Cardoza bought bandages at CVS, wrapped his own face, put on a black circular hat and a cut-down yellow raincoat and photographed himself. He calls those photographs the “Temu versions.”
Captain Nemo’s mask began as a physical object made by an artist in Spain. Cardoza bought it, sent the maker a contract and had the rights transferred.
He builds from public-domain versions of characters including Robin Hood, Captain Hook, Peter Pan, King Arthur and Tinker Bell. It was a rights decision as much as a creative one. He starts with figures nobody owns, rebuilds them, and protects what he creates around them.
The finished episodes are the unresolved part. Cardoza said several applications are pending and that he is submitting more evidence of human involvement: screen recordings of his editing in Premiere, his color grading in DaVinci, the effects work, the sound and music design.
“I’m pretty confident that when you show enough evidence, you’re going to be able to copyright pretty much everything,” he said.
How Seedance 2.5 Cut A Two-Week Job To Three Days
Episodes run 17 to 20 minutes. His Phantom X cofounder Sav cleans up effects when a shot comes back wrong; everything else is Cardoza.
In early 2025, the 11-and-a-half-minute The Ghost’s Apprentice took Cardoza 14 days to make, largely in Google’s Veo.
Eighteen months later, the numbers had barely moved. The latest chapter’s battle sequence runs roughly 12 and a half minutes and was generated in Seedance 2.0. Cardoza said it took 14 to 16 days, at around 90 generations for each usable shot. Crowd scenes require dozens of background figures to remain coherent.
The opening and campfire sequences together run for roughly another 12 minutes. Cardoza made those with Seedance 2.5, which ByteDance released on July 31. He had it earlier.
Magnific sells access to image and video models built by other companies, alongside tools of its own. Paula Vivas, the company’s head of marketing, said in a video interview that Creative Partners and Originals filmmakers get new releases before everybody else, so they can test them in production. Cardoza is one, and gives the product team feedback in return.
They took three days. For footage of similar length, a roughly two-week job had fallen to three days.
“I was just floored at how fast I was moving through the process,” he said.
Seedance 2.5 generates up to 30 seconds in one pass and accepts up to 50 references, useful for a series with 30 recurring characters. But Cardoza said it also inserted background music into almost every generation.
Because he writes his own score, he passed the clips through Moises, an AI audio-separation tool, to strip the music while keeping dialogue and effects.
It does not separate cleanly. Effects bleed into the music, and Cardoza said he lost some, building that episode’s sound by hand.
Better generation does not remove the work. It moves it.
How Magnific Funds An AI Show Without YouTube Advertising
The Chronicles of Bone carries no advertising. Cardoza said he does not monetize the show because he expects its mature content to limit its eligibility under YouTube’s advertiser-friendly guidelines.
The money comes from Magnific, the Malaga company formerly known as Freepik, which announced more than a million paid subscribers and $230 million in annual recurring revenue at its April rebrand. The series was its first Originals collaboration.
Cardoza described the arrangement as a standard studio deal and said he cannot disclose the numbers. Ángela Sarria González, who leads Originals and the creative community at Magnific, said in a video interview that Cardoza owns the creations and has creative control of them. Deals are done case by case. In this one, she said, he keeps the IP.
What Magnific brings, Sarria González said, is funding and credits, platform access and reach through events, PR and co-marketing. What the company gets back is the sign-up link in every episode description, which she called a natural way for people who find the show to see what they could make.
His target audience, Cardoza said, is not the small AI filmmaking community but general viewers, including some hostile to the method. The comment he receives most often is some version of: “Normally I hate AI, but I really like this.”
A few of those viewers follow the link.
Why Phantom X Lets AI Filmmakers Keep Their IP
The same ownership principle runs through Phantom X, the studio Cardoza cofounded with Mike J Mitch and Sav on January 1, 2025.
It now has five shows on its slate, including Mitch’s The Sage and Sav’s Exile Protocol. In each case, the filmmaker keeps the IP.
“We’re all about the artists keeping one hundred percent of their IP,” Cardoza said. “Phantom doesn’t own any of it, and their partners don’t own any of it.”
What Cardoza Is Actually Selling
When he started The Chronicles of Bone, Cardoza had 18,000 YouTube subscribers. The channel is now approaching 1 million subscribers. He wants to average 30 million views an episode, and has written all five seasons, carrying the story to 2031.
At the end of that run, he intends to take the property to a studio.
Magnific opened Originals in February, and Sarria González said in a follow-up email that hundreds of creators have brought projects to the program since. Vivas said Cardoza is the first she has seen setting out to own what he makes rather than simply make it, and expects others to follow.
What he will be carrying is not the footage. He has known since the Batman short that the tools date the work faster than it can be finished, and expects the episodes to look old by 2031. Nor is it the episodes, whose copyright status is unresolved.
It is the audience.
“Now you are not just shopping an idea,” Cardoza said. “You are shopping something that already has a proven audience.”