Corridor Digital

Corridor Digital is the Los Angeles production studio founded by Niko Pueringer and Sam Gorski in 2010, whose Corridor Crew channel — millions of subscribers strong — made “VFX artists react” a YouTube genre and built a reputation for pulling professional visual effects into internet filmmaking.

The AI anime that split the internet

On February 26, 2023, Corridor released “Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors,” a short shot on green screen and restyled with a Stable Diffusion model the team had fine-tuned on frames from the anime film Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. It drew 2.2 million views in eight days — and a ferocious backlash. Castlevania director Samuel Deats called the makers “lazy thieves spitting on an entire art form,” arguing that “when AI dudes say ‘democratize’ they just mean ‘steal’ and ‘exploit,’” and animators catalogued the technique’s reliance on uncredited training data and its telltale flickering errors.

Pueringer defended the experiment as a tool rather than a replacement for animators, writing on Reddit that the studio wanted to “help shine a light into the fog” for anyone trying to bring their imagination to life, while acknowledging change is frightening “if it feels like your passion or livelihood is on the line.” Rather than retreat, the crew doubled down: for the August 2023 sequel they retrained their model on art made by an artist friend to answer the consent objection, rebuilt the pipeline on WarpFusion, and shipped “Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors 2” to a notably calmer reception focused more on story than on the technology.

The episode remains a landmark case study in the AI art wars — cited by critics like Steven Zapata as the moment AI rotoscoping went mainstream, and by AI filmmaking advocates as proof that small teams can prototype styles once reserved for studios. Corridor has continued integrating generative tools into its VFX experiments since.