> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.thedaringcreatives.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Henry Daubrez Is Making His Own Animated Series, JUNKYARD KING - URL: https://www.thedaringcreatives.com/creator-stories/henry-daubrez-junkyard-king-ai-animated-series/ - Published: 2026-11-04T14:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-05T11:25:15.000Z - Description: Henry Daubrez (@henry.daubrez) spent nearly two decades building websites for clients. AI let him start making his own films, and now he's making his own animated series, JUNKYARD KING, with his new studio, Odd Kid. - Author: William Smith - Tags: Creator Stories, artist profile, ai animation, animated series, junkyard king, worldbuilding, google labs, veo, invideo, #medium:Whole worlds, #method:Mixed, #handle:@henry.daubrez, #tool:Imagen, #tool:Veo, #tool:Seedance, #tool:invideo, #tool:ElevenLabs, #tool:Photoshop, #issue-2026-10, opinion Henry Daubrez spent nearly two decades building websites and digital work for clients. AI let him start making his own films. Now he's making his own animated series, JUNKYARD KING, one long chapter at a time. He wanted to work in CGI and digital painting when he was young, but found almost no jobs in either. So he moved into building websites, he told [Rourke in a 2025 interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC2%5FmK78I3I&ref=thedaringcreatives.com), and stayed in that industry for nearly 18 years. In 2013 he joined [the Belgian studio Dogstudio](https://dogstudio.co/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com), and by his account on [the Dear Future podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO-wtPTzAJI&ref=thedaringcreatives.com), he "started at the very bottom of the ladder until being CEO." Films weren't part of the plan. He wrote under [Electric Pink on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmECe8LlQik&ref=thedaringcreatives.com) that "until recently I never really thought film making was in the cards for me." JUNKYARD KING is an original animated fantasy series. He started releasing it in March on [his YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@henrydaubrez?ref=thedaringcreatives.com), produced by [his new studio, Odd Kid](https://www.instagram.com/thisisoddkid/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com). Chapter 3 came out on October 7 and runs 16 minutes. ## What JUNKYARD KING is about Artie is a teenager who lives with his uncle, watches VHS tapes and samurai movies, and plays detective at night. Kids from his school have gone missing. While looking into it, he finds a katana in an abandoned junkyard, and the sword comes with a robot crow named Socket. In Chapter 0, The Pink Edge, Artie fights his first enemy, a rust knight made of walking scrap. He beats it by working out that it's a giant electromagnet. The characters are big-eyed and stylized against painted forests and scrapyards, and almost everything glows magenta. Henry Daubrez — "JUNKYARD KING, Chapter 0: The Pink Edge" (2026), on YouTube ([@henrydaubrez](https://www.youtube.com/@henrydaubrez?ref=thedaringcreatives.com)) ## Where the story comes from The story borrows from King Arthur. Artie is short for Arthur, the sword is called X-Cal, and Chapter 3 sends him through a gate into Avalon. In [his Upscale Conf talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D52LbJjo7rA&ref=thedaringcreatives.com) in San Francisco this June, Daubrez said "public domain IPs I think are a gold mine." He mixed in things he grew up on, too. He named MacGyver, the coming-of-age films of the '80s and '90s, and twenty years of reading manga. The series was "something I started as a test," he said. He'd been trying out Seedance, an AI video model, and Chapter 0 became the pilot. Once it worked, he wrote scripts. "I don't work without a script. I want to have a script and know where I'm going as a Bible," he said. ## Making it with invideo Chapters 1 to 3 were made with invideo, an AI video company. Agent One and Agent Two are its AI video agents, tools that take his directions and turn them into video. In [the Chapter 1 description](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR5SLjOsnj4&ref=thedaringcreatives.com) he wrote: "This episode started as a simple experiment with @invideo.io Agent One and somehow turned into a full 9-minute chapter." He liked where it moved his attention. "Instead of obsessing over keywords, I spent more time thinking about direction, camera angles, movement, pacing, character interactions, and dialogue," he wrote. He was upfront that this is "one of the reasons I've been spending more time talking with the Invideo team." He also wrote, "The product is still early, but I also think there's a tremendous amount of potential there." [Chapter 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNrBi2Z5THk&ref=thedaringcreatives.com) and Chapter 3 both open on a card crediting a collaboration with invideo's Agent Two. On stage he said he's still working out how he feels about agents. The two jobs that matter most to him are screenwriting and editing. The series also has [a companion browser game](https://junkyardking.io/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com): an arcade fighting game where you draw slashes to chain combos. Henry Daubrez — "JUNKYARD KING, Chapter 3: The Other Side" (2026), produced by Odd Kid, on YouTube ([@henrydaubrez](https://www.youtube.com/@henrydaubrez?ref=thedaringcreatives.com)) ## Eighteen years of websites At Dogstudio he kept trying to make websites people felt something about. "I've always been obsessed by storytelling," he told Rourke. The question he kept asking was "how can you create a website and experience which is going to engage people emotionally?" The studio grew to offices in Chicago, Amsterdam and Paris, making interactive sites and physical installations for clients including Marvel. A much larger company later bought it, and he stayed on. His painting background still shows up in his work. "Photoshop, 100% I'm still using it every day, all day long," he said. ## His first AI film In early 2024, still at the studio, his team made a short for Coca-Cola with AI tools and an illustrator animating frame by frame. "It took a team of like 10 people," he said on Dear Future. Then he got early access to Veo 2, Google's AI video model. He spent his Christmas break making Kitsune, a five-minute animated film about a fox, more or less alone. [The Kitsune description](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riExf1Hv30M&ref=thedaringcreatives.com) says he kept 1,700 clips out of roughly 5,000 to 7,000 generations. On Dear Future he described the hand-drawn look he was after: "I love the idea of trying to create a 2D animation film which feels close enough to the real deal that people wonder how it's done." ## Electric Pink and the Google residency Kitsune got studio executives and Google reaching out. Google then asked him to make a film for its I/O 2025 event, and let him make whatever he wanted. Electric Pink is about his own life. "The story is really literally about myself," he told Rourke. That includes the VHS tapes his parents filled with hours of 1980s TV ads. He made each shot as a still image in Imagen 3, Google's image model, and fixed it in Photoshop. Then he animated it in Veo 2\. The narrator's voice came from ElevenLabs, an AI voice tool. The film was tied to the launch of Flow, Google's AI filmmaking tool. Henry Daubrez — "Electric Pink" (2025), made for Google I/O, on YouTube ([@henrydaubrez](https://www.youtube.com/@henrydaubrez?ref=thedaringcreatives.com)) Afterward he left the studio and joined Google Labs as resident filmmaker, "the first one they have so far," working with the team that builds Flow. By the Upscale talk, he said, he was working with Google on contract so he could keep his freedom. [His Instagram bio](https://www.instagram.com/henry.daubrez/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) now lists him as founder of Odd Kid, with the residency marked as previous. ## OVERGROWN, a film about illness He spent six months on OVERGROWN, a 13-minute short released in July. It's about a young woman whose body is being taken over by a flowering plague. [His director statement](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWzjMLk7%5FZM&ref=thedaringcreatives.com) opens: "I have spent most of my life in the waiting rooms where Overgrown takes place." He lost both parents to cancer and has had it himself. At Upscale he said every festival he'd sent it to so far had turned it down. He wants people working with AI to aim past the AI festivals and "try to be accepted as filmmakers and not as AI filmmakers." Henry Daubrez — "OVERGROWN" (2026), on YouTube ([@henrydaubrez](https://www.youtube.com/@henrydaubrez?ref=thedaringcreatives.com)) Tools he credits himself [Imagen 3](https://deepmind.google/models/imagen/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) · [Veo 2](https://deepmind.google/models/veo/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) · Seedance · [invideo Agent One and Agent Two](https://invideo.io/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) · [ElevenLabs](https://elevenlabs.io/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) · Photoshop Imagen 3, Veo 2, Photoshop and ElevenLabs on Electric Pink (his description and the Rourke interview); Veo 2 on Kitsune; Seedance for the JUNKYARD KING pilot and invideo's agents for Chapters 1 to 3 (his Upscale talk, the Chapter 1 description and the chapters' opening credits). ## What's next for Odd Kid At Upscale he described setting up a studio for original stories. His pitch was that a small team can now test whether a world works before bringing in partners, and keep more of the rights. He pointed at [Gossip Goblin](https://www.thedaringcreatives.com/creator-stories/gossip-goblin-pomegranate/) "doing his own thing creating this universe." Chapter 3 of JUNKYARD KING takes Artie, Socket and a new ally, Kai, through the gate into Avalon. Its description promises new creatures and "one very big fight."