u/texemsol

I wanted to test whether current AI video tools can actually sustain a longer narrative instead of just producing a sequence of impressive standalone shots.

So I started adapting Nikola Tesla’s 1919 autobiography My Inventions chapter by chapter as a cinematic historical docudrama.

The biggest challenge has been continuity rather than individual shot quality: keeping Tesla recognizable across different ages and scenes, maintaining consistent period locations and costumes, and making dialogue and action sequences feel like parts of the same film.

The workflow is heavily reference-based, with locked character identities, environment references, start frames, controlled compositions, and separate generation strategies for dialogue, action and transitional shots.

Chapter 1 is finished here:

https://youtu.be/uquSanT_HCo

I’d especially appreciate feedback from other AI filmmakers on:

- character consistency

- pacing

- continuity between shots

- dialogue/lip-sync quality

- whether the AI artifacts remain distracting

- and most importantly, whether after a while you start watching the story rather than watching the AI

This is still an evolving workflow, so technical criticism is very welcome.

Most people know one quote from this interview: the vest pocket one. The whole piece is stranger and more interesting. It moves from wireless communication and fuel-less flying machines to "belted parking towers," and then ends with his predictions about women and the "civilization of the bee."

I made a film of it using only the words Collier's printed as his, cut but never reworded. The interviewer's questions are marked as reconstructed where Kennedy's article gives none. The voice and visuals are AI recreations, not archival, and I've said so in the description along with the full source (Collier's Weekly, 30 January 1926, p. 17).

This is my own channel, so take that into account. Happy to answer anything about the source or how the lines were chosen.

About 10 minutes, five questions, three AI characters at a desk. The words are real model outputs (unscripted, all prompts published in a repo), and everything visual is generated.

Pipeline:

- Stills / character frames: Nano Banana 2, set built around one camera plate so every shot lives in the same room

- Talking clips: LTX-2.5 audio-driven mode on a rented H100, driven by ElevenLabs audio

- Reactions/listening: LTX-2.5 i2v with generated audio muted

- Edit: by hand in an capcut, hard cuts only

The lesson that cost me the most GPU time: audio-driven LTX takes a subject reference, not a start frame. I fed it a full-profile wide shot early on — zero lip sync and it invented extra people in the scene. Reference needs to be front-facing, tight, and not busy. After that clicked, batches got way more usable.

This is the pilot so I know where it's rough. Planning weekly episodes. Curious what people here think about the character consistency across shots — that was the hard part.