Primordial Soup is an AI studio founded by award-winning, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, director of films including Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream, and The Whale. The studio brings together filmmakers, artists, and emerging AI technologies to explore new approaches to narrative filmmaking.
Since the beginning of 2026, Primordial Soup has been producing On This Day… 1776, a short-form animated YouTube series released by TIME Studios. Each episode revisits an event from America’s founding year on its 250th anniversary, using generative AI alongside traditional writing, performance, editorial, sound, and color workflows.
For Creative Director and Showrunner Hoyt Dwyer and his team, Topaz has become part of that finishing process. Starlight Precise 2.5 has been used across the series to upscale and refine generated footage, while two recent episodes pushed further with Hyperion 2.5, Topaz’s newest SDR-to-HDR conversion model. Dwyer describes Topaz as especially valuable at the end of the process, where AI-generated shots need to hold up in a professional post-production pipeline.
More Color Grading Latitude with Hyperion 2.5
For the comedy episode Happy Death Day, the ghosts of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson return every Fourth of July to reckon with the country they helped create.
The episode required the team to push the generated imagery in DaVinci Resolve, using a masked color grade to create a ghost stylization. The challenge? 8-bit GenAI sources do not hold up well under intensive color grading.
Primordial Soup used Hyperion 2.5 to convert the footage to 10-bit ProRes, providing substantially more color and luminance information for the finishing process before grading in Resolve.
According to Dwyer, “The Hyperion 8-bit to 10-bit conversion was super essential to this episode,” giving the team the additional color depth needed to push the ghost treatment much further without the footage breaking down. Moving GenAI sources into higher-bit-depth media before intensive grading and compositing gives artists more flexibility in post, with Topaz’s SDR-to-HDR workflow supporting professional 10-bit ProRes output for editorial and color workflows.
Creative Upscaling for an Anime Battle
For Anime Battle – Thomas Jefferson vs. King George III, the team took a different visual approach. Rendered in a bold anime style, the episode turns the ideological conflict between Jefferson and King George III into a stylized physical battle.
Instead of aiming for realism, Dwyer’s team used Astra 2, a creative video-to-video model that adds generative detail while upscaling, to sharpen the linework and further enhance the anime aesthetic. Hyperion 2.5 also solved a more technical problem. In an extreme close-up of King George III’s teeth, the team encountered visible banding in the generated source. After the shot was enhanced and upscaled, Hyperion was used to increase the color depth and reduce the visible banding before final delivery. View Episode
Building a Finishing Pipeline for GenAI Filmmaking
Primordial Soup’s workflow reflects a broader shift toward hybrid GenAI filmmaking, combining SAG actors and performance capture with GenAI animation and traditional post-production. Generation is only one part of the process; the footage still needs to be edited, enhanced, color graded, mixed, and prepared for professional delivery.
Topaz models including Starlight Precise 2.5, Astra 2, and Hyperion 2.5 help bridge the gap between generated imagery and finished production, giving Dwyer’s team more creative control and higher-quality results.
