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.

I’m developing a film inspired by my grandfather’s story. Here is the prologue. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Released 2 weeks ago an animation with Seedance, soon is ready the second one.

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 :-)