r/aifilmmaking

Honestly, I started this as a random experiment. I wasn't expecting much, I just wanted to see how far I could push Claude with one idea and let it run with it. Claude came up with the whole thing. I didn't write any of it. All I did was generate the visuals, and I kept my hands off the creative side as much as I could. When I watched the finished result, I was kind of stunned. It actually holds together, and a few moments genuinely got me. I'm sure it's not perfect, so I'd love to hear what works and what doesn't. Would you watch a full series like this? Be honest, I can take it.

This is one small piece of HIMIL, a medieval universe I have been researching and writing for more than 5 years. We’re trying to build it into an IP, and the plan is a TV show that anyone can watch for free on YouTube.

If you liked the short and want to support us, subscribing to the YouTube channel is the best way to help. I’d also love honest feedback on what still gives it away as AI.

Any comment or advice is appreciated. Thank you everyone.

For me, mapping audio to a generated face over a 10+ second clip starts to desync (is that even an actual word?), well, derail after a few seconds.

The models try to match the audio units to visible mouth shapes, but when the timestamp alignment isn't locked in. The generated lip movements start lagging the audio track by a few frames. The difference here, could just be a couple of frames. However, visually it looks fake.

My standard workaround for this is to cut the clips to just about 8 seconds before I really looked into this. If I understand it correctly, standard cloud engines have a hard time maintaining a tight audio-visual frame anchor over long clips, meaning the lag gets baked right into the video file before you even see it. Saw someone using MiniMax Design to move part of the work locally to manage the audio-visual sync. So basically, instead of trusting the cloud to do everything in one massive, drifting generation, it has localized canvas control to step-feed the audio track to the video frames in tight chunks, keeping the timing right before exporting.

Havent tried it, but has anyone else experimented with similar desktop-side canvas workflows to fix the issue?

This is what I do now, and I'm still adjusting it.

- One voice card per character before I write a line: timbre, pace, volume, verbal habits. Once it's written I don't touch it, because a mid-scene voice change is the fastest way to lose people.

- Lines get broken short, with pauses and stress marked on the page.

- Emotion goes in as what it sounds like. "Angry" becomes lower, slower, no lift at the end of the line.

- For key lines I generate several takes and pick the one that sounds most like that character. Voice settings stay fixed, only the pauses and emotion notes change. Then I match loudness across the scene.

- Dialogue, ambience and music sit on separate tracks. Whoever is speaking is on top. Ambience keeps running underneath at a slightly lower level, and music gets out of the way before the line starts. A voice that sounds dry is usually missing the room under it.

For lip sync, I currently render the picture with the dialogue first, fix the mouths, then swap the finished audio in with pace and pause positions unchanged. I don't know if that's the best order. Doing audio first seems to mean redoing the shot whenever a line changes.

How do you order lip sync and dialogue? And which slip is hardest to rescue once it's in: a voice that drifts between shots, or mouths that don't match?

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.