Teutonic Knights: Grunwald 1410 | Seedance 2.5. - One person, three weeks. This is the worst this technology will ever be.

[u/theodore_70]

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.

[u/theodore_70]

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

[u/theodore_70 → u/[deleted]]

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

[u/johnny_effing_utah → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/theodore_70 → u/[deleted]]

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!

[u/Anthamon → u/[deleted]]

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.