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.

This was a real challenge to do it.It was all easy, until I not faced the dwarfs. I think 2 days I played to avoid the protection of Seedance. Hard work :-) Offer a like on Youtube if you like the result :-)

I am not a lawyer. I am an author who has filed for copyright in the past. If anything is unclear, get a lawyer and / or talk to the copyright office. https://copyright.gov/ https://copyright.gov/registration/ https://copyright.gov/registration/literary-works/ https://copyright.gov/about/fees.html I first registered a book for copyright in 2005. There have been changes to the process :) I have not read through all of the pages here - please read for yourself and / or get a lawyer. My copyrighted books are how to with words and pictures. I submitted them as literary works. Way back then, paper forms were the only method, but it looks like they prefer electronic filing now. Electronic filing is $45 / paper filing is $125. Both are cheap to keep your stuff yours. My understanding is that if you don't have an actual copyright, it is impossible to win in court. What I plan on doing for content that I care about and want to copyright: Create a book with text description of my characters and sketches / drawings of them. Write the story in book format and add images as the story unfolds. -- Filing copyright for a script is different. -- Print the book and comb bind it. Submit an electronic registration. There are some books that are sketches of the art for computer games. You don't ever have to sell your book. If you get popular, write a nicer book and copyright and sell it :) I think if you go with the paper filing, they put a copy of your book in The Library of Congress, which is very cool :) I don't know how AI is handled. If you include AI images or text in your book, find out what needs to be done before you submit (and perhaps get in trouble). There are also ways to submit video, but I have never done that. If someone wants to pirate a video and put it on youtube major film studios can't seem to stop them.

In the past, creating all these infographics for the slides of a training I'm doing for the 10K HP Academy. Normally, this would take me a whole week, and thanks to Nano Banana and Claude, it took me 2 and a half hours! A total of 19 slides!

Creators often treat animatics as the finished, final product and animatics are a hit with YouTubers. 57% of 14 - 24-year-old animation fans watch animatics weekly or more. Independent creators on YouTube are more popular than the big animation studios.