First AI-generated Turkish drama debuts on Prime Video

Turkish television producer Ay Yapim has launched “Castle Walls,” a historical drama presented as one of the first series produced end-to-end with artificial intelligence to premiere on a major global streaming platform.

The two-episode series, known as “Surlar” in Turkish, consists of 15-minute episodes and explores the mysterious history of Alamut Castle in present-day Iran. The fortress is also featured prominently in Ubisoft’s “Assassin’s Creed Mirage” video game, Variety writes.

Written by Turkish television veterans Kerem Deren and Çisil Hazal Tenim, “Castle Walls” was produced by Ay Yapim through its Singapore-based subsidiary, AI Yapim.

According to Ay Yapim, the production used AI throughout the creative and production process, including a proprietary AI storyboard system developed by AI Yapim and AYDNA, a video diffusion model trained exclusively on Ay Yapim’s licensed content catalogue.

“Unlike many AI productions that draw on datasets of uncertain provenance, every element of the AYDNA training pipeline was built on rights-managed material,” the company said.

The production also retained significant human involvement. The series was dubbed into different languages by professional human voice artists, while “acting performances are not AI-generated,” Ay Yapim said.

The company said the series was developed over about a year using a combination of AI tools. ChatGPT was used for prompt enhancement and creative refinement, while MidJourney supported visual exploration. Runway and Google’s Nano Banana were used for character integration, while Veo, Kling, ComfyUI and Topaz contributed to video generation and cinematic production. Runway and ElevenLabs were also used for voice and dubbing.

“The production process itself tells its own story,” Ay Yapim said. “The first episode was built shot by shot using an inpainting technique that predates the current generation of image-generation tools — completed before now-ubiquitous models.”

“By the second episode, more advanced generative AI technologies were integrated into the pipeline,” it added. “The hand-drawn character and location sketches created by the human team before AI processing began demonstrate the level of creative and craft input that underpins every scene. This is not a production that bypassed human skill; it is one that used AI to amplify it,” the company said.

Ay Yapim, one of Türkiye's best-known television production companies, is behind internationally successful series including the International Emmy-winning “Endless Love,” as well as “Fatmagul,” “Ezel” and “Forbidden Love.”

By Sabina Mammadli