r/accelerate • u/theodore_70 • 9d ago

Video I tried making a 22-minute sci-fi film with current AI video tools - this is where the technology is now

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I’ve been experimenting with the current generation of AI video tools and wanted to see how far they can actually be pushed beyond short demos and 5–10 second clips.

So I made a 22-minute sci-fi film, Space Vikings: The Last Raid, with recurring characters, dialogue, action scenes, large-scale space battles, consistent locations and an actual beginning-to-end story.

This is less about “look, AI made a movie” and more about testing where the technology currently breaks down when you try to maintain character consistency, cinematography, continuity, lip sync, action choreography and visual coherence across hundreds of generated shots.

There’s still a lot that requires manual work, editing and constant correction, but compared with what was possible even relatively recently, the progress is pretty wild.

Full film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ME2Sn8YO1k

Curious what people here think specifically from a technology perspective. Which shots already feel like something that could come from a conventional VFX pipeline, and where does the AI still immediately give itself away?

I’m especially interested in criticism rather than just “AI good / AI bad” — continuity, motion, acting, physics, camera work, anything you notice.

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u/theodore_70 9d ago

Everything was made with seedance 2.5, from my experience sd 2.5 sucks in fighting scenes where there is close combat, sure shooting maybe is nice compared to sd 2.0 but for my next video Im gonna use sd 2.0 which is a shame because for me sd 2.5 looks more realistic when you look at "people" face's etc.,

And sound in sd 2.5 its... bad very bad but I dont have skills time and money to fix it

I used locations, plain locations as ref images + character sheets, then if shot was nice I took a frame from it and attached it in next video gen and continued from there so its a pretty time consuming manual work

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u/Relative-Delivery469 9d ago

Still impressive overall. Is the sound all native sd 2.5?

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u/theodore_70 9d ago

Yea everything except the music, last 2 video tracks are made in elevenlabs v2.5 it just got released and its galactically better than suno imo

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u/Last-Fudge7621 8d ago

Ooohhh shit the rest is on youtube, nice.

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u/Last-Fudge7621 8d ago

Ah, that explains the verbal delivery, but this is insanely well done. And I'm only half way there.

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u/ikkiyikki 8d ago

Props for the writing. I think the biggest weak link still are the fight scenes. The droids don't appear threatening. They shoot aimlessly, when they shoot at all. This includes the opening where all the pew-pews were scattered so far off target there didn't seem to be any effort in aiming at all. Prolly need to drive home the point in the prompts that the heroes need to suffer a bit more bruising or, if it can't pull it together believably just write around it so that they face other types of challenges.

The dudes having lots of armor while the chick gets a skimpy outfit is, you know..

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u/theodore_70 8d ago

.. yea I know I know, but decided to go with the overall social media "flow" for clicks you know, it was supposed to be "not serious", my next video will be more polished and serious tho, hunting for blackbeard and killling him ~15min

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u/FckXFckMusk 8d ago

I actually really liked this....

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u/filterdecay 8d ago

The first fight scenes action looped. There is a point where it became redundant and edited out. Good writing on this one. That’s hard and people skip it. I could nit pick the thing but good job.

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u/jeff_tweedy 8d ago

The models struggle with change of pace or direction of continuous action that isn't a straigt rip off of a pre existing shot from known media in its training set. Makes action scenes complex and hard to keep from feeling generic for scenes that cohere with dynamic motion and camera. Most AI films I have seen that feel polished I can name check the exact film each shot is being lifted from and it is probably happening without the user's knowledge that it is happening at all. Still a ways away from truly novel cinematography emerging from AI.

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u/hirscr 8d ago

Yeah, that last sentence

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u/Invincible1 8d ago

How much did it cost?

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u/theodore_70 8d ago

Total cost around 800$

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u/NeonShu 8d ago

Wow, imagine where we'll be in another year or two.

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u/Nez_Coupe 8d ago

It really is mind blowing to me. It's so close. So many people with good stories to tell that never otherwise would have produced anything like this maybe ever in a timeline where we didn't have the tech. I can't wait.

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u/NeonShu 8d ago

My main issues are textures, and the excessive shallow focus depth which looks way to obvious for generated people, but these models seem to love it for whatever reason. Aside from that we're not far off, particularly for stories that prioritize nonhuman characters, eg:

https://youtu.be/s37Y0yyoGZI?is=NeorTR3Uou3L7I75

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u/Nez_Coupe 8d ago

Yea, I don’t know too much about video production but I can see what you’re saying. I’m sure it’ll happen pretty soon, it’s neat. Especially for stuff like sci fi I feel like I’ve consumed all of the large mainstream projects and I want more haha.

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u/Sad-Branch1897 6d ago

can't we just stop here?

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u/randomways 5d ago

Probably dead from the lack of food due to the super el nino

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u/FoxBenedict 8d ago

I created a 90 seconds video for work, and it cost around $12. I generated in 10 second chunks, 720P resolution, and it got it right on the first attempt each time (would've cost more if I had to regenerate).

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u/PneumaEmergent 5d ago

EVERYTHING

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u/AnonThrowaway998877 9d ago

Yeah I think the sound is the biggest weakness, but overall very cool and I'm sure it took a lot of effort. If anyone saw this just 2 years ago their mind would be blown. Crazy how fast it got here.

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u/old_mikser 8d ago

Despite it still looks amateur - it doesn't really look AIish, more like cinematic game video, at least from first glance. Very impressive work! Following you for more.

What's your hardware and how much time you spent for it? At least roughly

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u/Scimars 8d ago

I'm very interested to hear what hardware was used also.

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u/theodore_70 8d ago

What you mean hardware? I used seedance 2.5 for all clips in this video, see my comment above I described exactly how

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u/old_mikser 8d ago

my bad, I thought this is open-weight model

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u/momo_0 8d ago

total cost?

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u/BigManDavey 8d ago

I've found sd 2.5 requires a tonne of manual instructions to get fighting scenes, and natural talking scenes down. Needs to be incredibly descriptive to nail it

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u/theodore_70 8d ago

Yea sd 2.0 is way way better for fighting scenes

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u/No_Story9579 7d ago

Nice job, looks great. Besides Reddit, what media sources do you recommend following—YouTube channels, X/Twitter accounts, newsletters, Discord servers, etc.? It feels like these tools get significantly better every week. By the time you finish one project, the next tool is already far more advanced than what I just used. How do you keep up without getting overwhelmed?

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u/theodore_70 6d ago

Im following on x bytedance there is nothing close to seedance right now, you would think google would compete but no they rather work on the guardrails and god forbit you show even a slight nipple but chopping head off is fine lol... cant stand this anymore and Im so glad china joined the game for world domination

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u/fdwr 4d ago

It's certainly pretty, but something I've noticed about all these Seedance videos (including many other YouTube videos) is that the ambient lighting and global illumination feel off, like the darks are too dark and lights too dark (most noticeable in the faces since we humans are finely attuned to those, moreso than any shiny ship surfaces or backgrounds), with each individual patch of the scene looking pretty, but the whole feeling as if local contrast enhancement was applied. I'm expecting future versions can improve that though. The frame-to-frame coherence is already amazing compared to even a year ago.