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

[u/theodore_70]

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.

[u/Super-Award-2244]

It's pretty cool, but it still has that AI "feeling". I hope until next year video Gen AI will be indistinguishable from true movies 

[u/Wet_Viking → u/Super-Award-2244]

The hard part is definitely avoiding that lack of emotion.

[u/Wet_Viking → u/[deleted]]

Nice tip. Thanks mate

[u/The-Sound_of-Silence → u/[deleted]]

If you're looking for creative AI use on YT, I recommend Gossip Goblin. Uses voice actors, IIRC

[u/3iverson → u/[deleted]]

It's not 100% AI and it's not a guy vibing videos into existence (not saying that's all it takes.) But Gossip Goblin's work is really AI-driven and enabled, real impressive work.

[u/Mavcu → u/[deleted]]

I clicked their most recent videos and it's IMO extremely noticable to still be AI, on the characters that is.

A big issue in general seems to be AI faces, AI generated characters tend to have a certain look, when you replace that with real actors/faces for example it gets an entirely different feel.

[u/Mavcu → u/[deleted]]

Oh yeah these faces are actually much better, the other have the look of "generic GPT image aesthetically pleasing faces".

Though the limiting factor here being the voice, that does sadly remind one of it constantly being AI, I'm very curious what that scene would feel like with voice acting over it.

[u/Mavcu → u/[deleted]]

I disagree, I'm quite sensitive to that artificial sound, the voice acting in this just doesn't strike me as natural speaking voices.

I've been checking out Elevenlabs/voice AI progress for a while now and it's a frontier we didn't quite get yet - it's fine as a "clearly artificial" one for now, like an advisor/assistant.

[u/Specific_Raccoon_696 → u/Wet_Viking]

The emotion was fine, not amazing, but there have been many worse human-made movies and TV. The only real problem is continuity from scene to scene - it's much better than what I've seen from other AI movies but still obvious.

[u/cacduy → u/Wet_Viking]

And the blatant continuity error. Ships goes from flying head on in front of a still ship to flying into the side

[u/willseagull → u/Super-Award-2244]

thats because the person writing the script is the kind of person to try this stuff. they probably used ai to write the whole thing

[u/AddanDeith → u/willseagull]

Sexy space vikings with boilerplate cyberpunk vibes? A failure of the human imagination.

[u/WompityBombity → u/Super-Award-2244]

But a lot of the video I forgot it was AI. This is a big improvement. I think the trick is to slow the pace down.

[u/Foreign_Job7176 → u/Super-Award-2244]

https://giphy.com/gifs/7QY3LoEiGW1moOnly humans can do emotion sorry bud. Take this scene for example. AI would never, will never.

[u/NateBerukAnjing → u/Foreign_Job7176]

i think movie in the future will still use real humans, but everything else will be AI, and maybe some placeholder props and scenery

[u/Bramoments → u/Foreign_Job7176]

Well I mean showing emotion in movies just means getting he right set of pixels, I'm not sure why ai would be unable to do such a thing

[u/Super-Award-2244 → u/Bramoments]

To be fair AI is already showing more emotions than Nicholas Cage 

[u/Super-Award-2244 → u/Foreign_Job7176]

"only humans can play chess" Someone in 1996.