How do you make an AI movie?

What an AI movie actually is

No current model renders a whole movie from one prompt. Video models generate clips of a few seconds to about fifteen; Arc's clips are 4–15 seconds. A movie is hundreds of those clips, each planned as a shot, cut together with sound. The craft is everything around the generation: deciding what each shot shows, keeping the people and places the same from shot to shot, and editing. We have released 8 films and series made this way, 234 minutes in total, listed below.

Step 1: Write the story for the medium

Write a script or a detailed treatment, then break it into chapters or episodes of five to ten minutes. Long scripts are easier to plan, review and render in parts, and a chapter structure gives the audience breaks that hide changes of location. Shots that work well: one action per shot, a clear light source, a short line of dialogue. Shots that work badly: crowds doing different things, fine hand work, text on screen, long continuous dialogue.

Keep the cast small. High Note has about 5 core characters and 6–8 sets across 40 episodes, and consistency was easy because the same few references appear in nearly every shot. The Fall of Kalak has 13 characters and 21 locations, which is workable but needs more care.

Step 2: Lock the look before any shot

Write a style brief that applies to every frame: the medium (photographic, painted, 3D), the palette, the lens and the light. Put it at project level, not in each shot. For The Fall of Kalak the brief included rules such as no blue sky and crimson only for blood, the sun and the king. Rules written as positives work better than lists of things to avoid, which models sometimes read as instructions to include.

Step 3: Build the cast and sets as references

Make one reference image per character, location and important prop, and iterate on each until it is right. Every shot then attaches the references it needs, which is what keeps a face recognizable across hundreds of shots. In Arc a Seedream 5.0 Lite reference costs 13 credits, so a cast of a dozen characters and twenty locations is a few hundred credits: cheap next to the video. See keeping characters consistent for the details.

Step 4: Plan every shot

Turn each scene into a shot list: framing, who is in it, what they do, what they say, how long it runs. In Arc the agent drafts a script plan per episode and you confirm it before full scripts are written. For our longest films we wrote the shot units by hand and loaded them as plans, because a long chapter exceeded what the planner produced in one pass. Either way the shot list is the document you will keep coming back to.

Step 5: Storyboard, then render

Generate a storyboard frame for each shot and fix framing and casting there. A frame costs 13 credits; a 10-second 720p clip costs 94 on Seedance 2.0 Mini and 751 on Seedance 2.0, so a wrong shot caught on the board is 7–58 times cheaper than one caught on video. Then render the approved shots. The Fall of Kalak rendered all 427 shots in 1 day.

Step 6: Review shot by shot and regenerate

Watch every clip. Regenerate the ones where a face drifted, a prop vanished or the action is wrong, and leave the rest alone. Across our first five series, 15% of video spend went to re-renders. Typical misses we saw: a narrator voice invented over a nearly empty shot, a character's skin painted blue because a colour word sat next to her face, a helmet on in one shot and off in the next.

Step 7: Edit, sound and finish

• Assemble the cut. Arc assembles episodes and exports the film or a Jianying draft; we did chapter cards, music and the final mix in an editor outside Arc.
• Add narration where the clip audio does not carry the story. The Wolf Mother uses a narrator who names who is telling the story, which also bridges the time jumps between chapters.
• Caption from speech recognition, then check names: in The Fall of Kalak the first caption track had six name errors. On Blood Sun: The Fall of Kratos aligning the script to speech timings fixed 396 of 400 lines.
• Upscale only the finished cut, if at all. We render at 720p and upscale masters to 4K when the platform rewards it.

How long and how much

Rendering is the fast part: hours to a day for a feature. Writing, references and review take days. In money, The Fall of Kalak cost 113 US dollars in video at our provider prices; see what a feature-length AI movie costs for list prices on other models.

Where Katechon Arc fits

Arc is built for this workflow: one project holds the script plan, references, storyboards, clips, voice and the assembled film, organized as episodes that share a cast. All of our released films were made in it.

Arc renders with Seedance 2.0 models only, in clips of 4–15 seconds, and its editing is assembly rather than a full timeline; for colour grading, scoring and fine cutting you still need a video editor.

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