How long does it take to make an AI movie?

Q: How long does it take to make an AI movie?

Rendering is quick: all 427 shots of our 42-minute feature The Fall of Kalak rendered in 1 day. The whole film, from bible to upload, takes days to weeks, because writing, reference images, review and the edit are where the hours go.

Where the time goes

A feature-length AI film, stage by stage (our experience)
Stage	What happens	Time it took us
Story	Bible, episode or chapter plan, script	Days; the longest stage for an original story
Look and cast	Style brief, reference sheets for characters, locations and props	Hours to a day, mostly iterating on faces
Shot planning	One unit per shot with action, dialogue and references	A day or more for hundreds of shots
Rendering	Clips generated from the confirmed shots	Hours; 427 shots in 1 day for The Fall of Kalak
Review and retakes	Watch every clip, regenerate misses	Hours per episode
Edit and sound	Cut, narration, music, captions, mix	Days for a feature

What slows a production down

Waiting. Across our first five series we logged about 50 hours of stalls: provider queues, failed jobs and, twice, a provider balance running out mid-render.
Retakes. 15% of our video spend went to re-renders; each one is also review time.
Blocked generations. A character whose face looks like a famous actor can have a share of his shots refused, and the fix (recasting the face) means re-rendering all of his shots.
Captions. Speech recognition misspells invented names; checking proper nouns is a manual pass.
Too many characters and sets. Each one is another reference to make, another thing that can drift.

How to go faster

Write the story to be simple: few characters, few sets, one action per shot.
Approve storyboard frames before rendering, so fewer clips come back wrong.
Render a whole episode at once on one model, and review it in a single pass.
Reuse existing clips where they fit. Our 30-episode fairy series reused footage from earlier episodes as filler.
Cut from what you have. BROODFALL became a 10:09 cut from 972 clips already rendered when the provider balance ran out.

Shorter formats

A one-minute vertical episode is six or so clips (Blood Sun averaged 6.0 shots per episode), so once the cast exists an episode can go from script to rendered in an hour or two. A series of 30 to 45 episodes is mostly a writing and review job.

Where Katechon Arc fits

Arc keeps the whole production in one project and renders batches of shots in parallel, which is how a feature's shots fit into one day of rendering.

Arc does not write a finished film for you in one click; the planning and review stages still take human time, and its renders depend on the video provider's queue.