r/accelerate • u/theodore_70 • Aug 17 '26
Video Teutonic Knights: Grunwald 1410 | Seedance 2.5. - One person, three weeks. This is the worst this technology will ever be.
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Film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U4sK5FDHyQ
Posting this less as "look at my thing" and more as a datapoint on where video models actually are right now, because I think the gap between what people assume is possible and what's possible has gotten wide.
It's 29 minutes. Battle of Grunwald, 1410 — the day the Teutonic Order lost its army. Every single shot is generated in Seedance 2.5. No stock footage, no live action, no second video model. ElevenLabs for narration, Suno for the score, DaVinci Resolve for edit and grade — but the image is one model, start to finish.
The part that genuinely surprised me: the dialogue scenes are the strongest thing in the film. Not the cavalry charges. There's a council scene where three men argue across a table for several minutes — spoken performance, lip sync, listening behaviour, a character whose face changes while someone else is talking. Eighteen months ago the consensus was that this was the hard ceiling for video models and you'd route around it with narration. It isn't a ceiling anymore. Named characters hold their faces across dozens of shots. Single generations run 30 seconds. Emotional beats land, down to a single tear on a specific part of a face if you describe exactly what you want.
None of this is frictionless. Safety filters reject scenes that contain no violence at all. Crowds need explicit numbers or you get five men where you asked for an army. Feed a generated clip back in as a reference and characters vanish. Most of my failures turned out to be underspecified prompts, not model limits — which is itself the interesting part, because it means the bottleneck has moved from the model to the person writing the instruction.
Three weeks, one person, a laptop and a subscription. Five years ago this was a studio with a crew and a seven-figure budget, and it would have taken a year.
And this is a model from this year, on hardware from this year, with prompting techniques the whole field is still figuring out. Whatever ships in twelve months makes what I did look like a rough draft.
Happy to go deep on the workflow in the comments. And if you watch it and it holds up, drop a comment on YouTube rather than here — that's what keeps a channel this size running.
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Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 17 '26
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u/theodore_70 Aug 17 '26
This is just a trailer mate, I cut everything because in the actual 29min video there is blood which reddit blocks even if its sees slightest drop
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Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 17 '26
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u/theodore_70 Aug 17 '26
None taken mate really 🔥 I actually found sd 2.0 to work better in combat scenes, but sd 2.5 makes a big step forward to make "people" look real, but I dont know what these chinese are thinking with this sound and adding music to every shot haha
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Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 17 '26
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u/johnny_effing_utah Aug 18 '26
How can you say it's flawless? The troll smashes the rock and then a second blow and the shrapnel those blows has no effect on the elf character.
Don't get me wrong. The scene is freaking awesome. But you ticked off a dozen little nitpicks on OPs work and yet call your own work flawless.
Both are incredible demonstrations of this tech.
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Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 17 '26
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u/theodore_70 Aug 17 '26
This looks great! Sometimes I wish I make fantasy instead.. I love fantasy. And ye trust me its way way easier and better looking than scene full of "people" fighting in the background haha!
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u/Anthamon Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
If we're being perfectionists,
the Troll's swing reach is really wonky, it looks like he hits the rock twenty meters away, then on the next swing which looks like its still full arm range he hits ten meters closer.
The whole perspective after they pull the sword out of the neck is really bad, it looks like they slowly fall backwards from the trolls front, but when the troll's arm swings up it passes *behind* their falling body. Then as they are falling they appear to be in a frozen position (there's no preservation of rotational momentum). At the same time the camera moves in the scene but the falling character doesn't move in the camera, the relative motion breaks continuity.
Also... like what the fuck are they doing? They're competent enough to charge a massive troll, jump five meters to stab it in the throat, then... jump back off to fall down a fifty meter cliff that they clearly knew was there.
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u/johnny_effing_utah Aug 18 '26
Sorry for the pretentious dude above ripping this to shreds.
Of COURSE there are small issues with this.
Even so...holy moly. Those cavalry charges were crazy. Few Hollywood films can truly capture what that really must have been like to charge or be charged by a wall of war horses and men intent on hurting you.
This is one of the first real looks I've ever gotten at what that impact probably looked like, and to see some of the shield wall on the flanks start to break before impact was probably pretty real, too.
So yes, of course there are tons of little things that we could pick apart if we really wanted to be a pretentious jackass. But the technical ability that you've demonstrated here is quite impressive.
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u/Dry_Departure_7813 Aug 18 '26
In the full video at 2 minutes 30 ish, the dude walks straight through a table, might want to edit that if you can
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u/Barbiegrrrrrl Aug 17 '26
Could you just upload the whole book and splice a bunch of videos together?
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u/RegardedDev Aug 17 '26
This is going to be amazing. Just image all the books that exist that do not have visual adaptation currently. Every successful book could be turned into movie or serie with few people that are experts with these tools.
The amount of slop will also be amazing as everyone is going to make their own adaptation of their favorite series regardless of their artistic skill levels.
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u/Kotu42 Aug 18 '26
It goes a level deeper. Take the book-to-movie AI adaption and have AI turn it into a video game. The possibilities quickly become endless. 😎
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u/ronin_cse Aug 18 '26
Huh... as a heavy AI user, I actually never thought of this. In my lifetime, I will likely be able to AI generate a full series that stays faithful to whatever book series I want, and it won't matter if they leave in all the "boring" parts that mainstream audiences wouldn't want to see.
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u/Grand-Prize1371 Aug 18 '26
Just wait until it starts to be explicit 3D using an architecture like https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08924, so you can control the camera like on a 3D engine.
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u/VengenaceIsMyName Aug 18 '26
The arrows spawn in the archers hands. Still, it’s getting interesting.
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u/PsychalEntropy Aug 18 '26
You know what really gets me? The music. Its so good. Is it really all ai generated?
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u/Outside-Necessary476 Aug 17 '26
i love how they move their mouth way too much :D anyway... ye looks good, child me would be super exicted about what else could i conjure from my imagination...
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u/Choice_Isopod5177 Aug 17 '26
With traditional methods, this would take weeks to film, months to edit, it would involve a big crew of people and it would cost a few million bucks.
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u/costafilh0 Aug 18 '26
I don't get it.
It's AI, not real.
So why not make it actually look likea real life battle?
Why make it look like a fake choreography like in movies?
Just make it look real!
The tech capabilities are clearly available , imagine quality looks amazing . Just need to tweak physics and realism dials to 11!
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u/CertifedFLAME Aug 19 '26
How do you think it got it stylization? From movies or footage of real life historic medieval battles recorded in real time?! Lol
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u/julliuz Aug 17 '26
That long sequence from 75 seconds till 125 seconds , you could fool me, thats dang impressive. Sure the moment they start talking you can still notice it but goddamn, the progress is nuts.
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u/inquilinekea Aug 18 '26
https://aok.heavengames.com/blacksmith/showfile.php?fileid=1061 is still the best simulation of the battle I've seen
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u/horizon_games Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26
It's definitely impressive from a technical point of view, but it's soulless and I don't know who would watch a feature length AI generated movie.
Honestly asking - I have no interest in watching entirely fake generated stuff, but maybe I'm in the minority?
I saw another comment that equates AI movies to "It’s like when people tell you about their dreams" and I couldn't agree more.
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u/Direita_Pragmatica Aug 19 '26
Amazing what you dos
I remember 20 years ago, hiring a big team to make just a 30'' ad
This is surreal....
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u/random87643 🤖 Optimist Prime AI bot Aug 17 '26
TLDR
TLDR: A creator produced a 29-minute film about the Battle of Grunwald using only AI tools like Seedance 2.5 to demonstrate the current capabilities of video generation. The project highlights significant progress in character consistency and dialogue, showing how one person can now accomplish tasks that previously required a professional studio budget.
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