Made a full teaser for my first AI feature film — based on my grandfather's real story (Gulag survivor, 1948)

I've been working for months on a teaser for my debut AI-generated feature film, and I'd love feedback from this community.

The film is called "Brotherhood in the Bitter Cold" — inspired by the true story of my grandfather, a Transylvanian Hungarian who survived a Soviet labor camp and walked home from Siberia in 1948. The project is part AI experiment, part memoir, part love letter to a man who rarely spoke about what he lived through.

WORKFLOW:

— Script and storyboard: written by me, based on my novel of the same name (not yet published)

— Character references, Cloth Reference, Environment Generation: Nano Banana (Gemini) with family photo references for facial consistency

— Video generation: Seedance with detailed per-shot prompts

— Narration: ElevenLabs v3 with intention-based tags for an elderly voice

— Music: Suno

TECHNICAL NOTES:

— Maintained character consistency across shots using reference sheets generated in Nano Banana, then reinforced via Img2Vid in Seedance

— Developed custom prompt structures for every generation using Claude Desktop with dedicated Skills (one Skill per tool: Seedance director, Nano Banana reference-sheet builder, ElevenLabs voice director, etc.)

— Built custom character identity docs for each of the main characters to keep visual continuity across 40+ generations

— Aspect ratio 21:9

CHALLENGES:

— Facial consistency across long sequences remains the hardest problem

— Text generation (carved into wood, etc.) still fails reliably

— Period-correct wardrobe required heavy negative prompting (Seedance defaults wanted to add German/Alsatian half-timbering to Eastern European scenes)

- Seedance still denies a lot of prompts, especially images with faces — Higgsfield Cinema Studio 3.5 solves this quite well as an alternative

- Cost is significant: ~$300+ for 3 minutes of final output (teaser + prologue combined), which is steep for an independent creator. Much of that is re-generations and failed prompts — the "visible cost" is only part of the total spend.

Total production time: 1 week of part-time work for teaser + prologue. Much of that was iteration, not generation — the "prompt until it works" loop is still the bottleneck.

KEY LESSON:

The first 20% of the work (concept, script, reference sheets) determines 80% of the final quality. Once the character bible and style guide are locked, generation becomes much more efficient. Skipping that foundation means regenerating forever.

The companion novel is nearly complete and will be on Amazon soon.

Teaser link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gno4GhBPNXg

Open to questions about any part of the workflow. Also genuinely curious how other filmmakers in this community are handling consistency at feature length — I don't think we've solved it yet.

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