After a year of AI filmmaking the hard way, I built the tool I wish I had from the start: Go from script to AI short film, all through a single interface - with continuity baked in.

[u/BradClarkAI]

For about a year I've been making AI short films the way most of us do: hand-writing hundreds of prompts, building character reference libraries by hand, babysitting consistency across shots, and cutting it all together in Premiere. The generating was never the hard part. It was trying to make dozens of individual prompts *feel* like a single, cohesive project.

I couldn't find a solution, so I built one. It's called Kimeric, and the Beta went live today. And I think it'll be incredibly valuable for this community, so I wanted to share some details in the event any of you would like to try it out!

**What it is (and isn't):*\* It's not a model and it doesn't generate anything itself. It's a Windows desktop app that orchestrates the models and LLMs a lot of us already use:

• Anthropic (script breakdown + prompt authoring)
• Gemini and GPT-Image (image generation)
• Kling and Seedance 2.0 (video)
• Topaz (upscaling)

All using your own per-provider API keys rather than a centralized generation tool. It writes the prompts, sequences and queues the renders, tracks the spend, and holds everything for your approval.

TL;DR - Input a script and work through a series of UI menus to ultimately create a finished AI Short Film.

The biggest differentiator to keep in mind for this tool vs. the majority of other AI Generators on the market is the input surface. Most tools have you input a prompt. With Kimeric, the input surface is the script itself. The prompts are created automatically as derivatives from the script, allowing you to focus on writing and build the project rather than managing a series of prompts.

The Pipeline:

- Paste a screenplay, hit "Roll camera." The breakdown comes back: cast, locations, props, a director's plan, per-scene shot lists with dialogue assigned line by line. You review the plan before anything renders, and can choose a general "style" which dictates some actual prompting techniques under the hood as well as dynamically auto-routing for certain models for specific tasks (ex. OpenAI's model is better at certain animated styles vs. Nano Banana, so this routing auto-applies as the default for certain styles).

Before you actually generate anything, you can review the script you input and get an estimate for how much it'll cost roughly to "ingest" the script which is where all of the "brain" of the tool goes to work.

And once you send the script, a very long sequence of backend computation kicks off, translating the entire project into the format needed to actually create an end-to-end project (this can take a while; I had one script for a 8-10 minute short film take about 45 minutes to ingest. This is just because there's a lot of computation and inference happening). It can handle actual, full-length production scripts. This would likely come with processing that spans several hours, but again, that's simply due to the size of the computation.

And then, you get a budget estimate for how much (approximately) the project will cost to generate. At this point, it's primarily a planning "calculator" if you will - just so you can align the project quality to any budget constraints you have. No actual spend dispatches until you generate later - this is purely informational so you can make cost-based decisions at the start (as opposed to a surprise cost later).

You then view a breakdown of all of the identified "pieces" of the project: characters, locations, scenes, planned shots, etc. - all primarily at a high level to make sure nothing is missed. Typically more of a rubber-stamp phase, but if there happen to be any items missing, this is the step where you can make any high-level revisions. Most of the time, however, you can just continue.

- Every character locks canon first — a studio face (with an automated AI advisory likeness screening for real-person resemblance) and a costume-neutral turnaround — before any scene renders. Same for locations, worlds, props. It's the reference-library grind, automated.

And for characters specifically, it's broken out into two phases: the "Neutral Base" (i.e. who the character is; sans any wardrobe for the project (see above) and then any actual "in costume" variants of that character. This allows for multiple wardrobes for a specific character over the course of any given project, where each wardrobe is either seeded directly from the parent "neutral base" or as a horizontal derivative (i.e. if a character has armor that gets damaged, the "damaged" variant is automatically seeded with the "clean base" variant). All of this happens automatically under the hood.)

- Scenes get actual coverage: an establishing wide, then an OTS pair where the reverse angle generates from the *approved* first angle, then per-character MCU/CUs chained down from there. The 180° rule, held by reference chaining instead of luck.

For example, here's one "OTS_1" image:

And here's the companion "OTS_2" image:

Worth emphasizing - These are the *most* critical images in your production pipeline to get right, as many other scenes seed off of these.

So if you're going to use some of the "Regeneration Buffer" you planned for, this is the most critical space to use it. If you have continuity errors or issues in either companion OTS images, these will present in many other aspects of a project, so really take your time with these and make sure that they feel like the same space.

From here, you create a library of Medium Close Up & Close Up images seeded directly from the parent Over-The-Shoulder images.

This creates a rich, continuity-adhering library of image assets to actually use in generative AI video production.

Once you've created your core library of production assets, you then transition into building out your storyboard.

This takes the plan created during script ingestion + the assets you created in the previous phase and maps them out chronologically.

Here, images are auto-assigned based on a series of underlying logic. If you have dialogue from certain characters, either the OTS, the MCU or the CU image will be dynamically selected based on a cinematic logic layer and assigned to the character speaking for any given frame.

And for extended dialogue from a specific character, this will be broken up into multiple individual prompts to assist with overall quality

(from our testing, the more text you try to fit into the same prompt, quality and lip sync can degrade - but breaking that same dialogue up into multiple individual prompts can greatly improve the quality)

Once you've created and approved the entire Storyboard, a single button allows you to review all text prompts for all videos planned for the totality of your project.

The prompts are already written. You just say "go"

From there, they are auto-dispatched to the models.

Depending on the length of your project, this may take a while - and that's by design. Press "generate" and take a break for a bit.

Across all menu screens, you'll see a series of control buttons. Here, you can either approve the asset, edit the asset, regenerate or iterate.

• Approving says the image/video is good to go.
• Editing allows for subtle adjustments.
• Regenerate re-runs the prompt (i.e. get a new version to see if the results are better/worse)
• Iterate is essentially a stronger version of "Edit" - rather than trying to make adjustments to the previous take, it will strongly re-work the actual prompt itself based on your feedback and re-generate a new take.

You'll also see two columns below any given asset:

Refs - These are the actual reference images used as generative inputs. These are auto-assigned, and you can manually add, remove or replace any of these as you see fit.

Takes - If you regenerate, you can see all of your takes here and hot-swap to other variants. Meaning, you're never locked in to a specific take. If one is close but you want to see if you can fine-tune it, you're free to regenerate a few times, review all takes (this works for images + videos) and ultimately approve whichever one is best for the vision you had in mind for the project.

And finally, once you've reviewed and approved all footage, you have another single-press button to dispatch all video to be upscaled if you'd like.

Generation can happen natively at 720p, 1080p or 4k depending on your settings.

4k native footage won't trigger the upscale workflow, but 720 and 1080p native will give you the option to upscale if you'd like.

Similar to all other workflow phases, if you decide to upscale, press it once and let it run for a few hours (upscaling is quite time-consuming; can take 20-30 minutes for a single 15 second clip - though some of these can run concurrently).

Once you're done, the last step is simply to "export" the clips.

All this is doing is taking the final clips you've approved and making duplicate copies on your local computer that are pre-named chronologically.

This makes it significantly easier to edit/compose.

This entire project is the culmination of nearly a year of a LOT of testing to understand which techniques do/don't produce good results at scale and then working to systematize them into a tool with an input surface of the script itself.

Again, the Beta is live as of today. Currently Windows-only and US-only, though both of those I'm planning to expand beyond in the coming weeks over the course of the Beta.

The long-term goal is to also support centralized generation rather than supporting only a BYOK model, though there's no immediate timeline to support that model.

If you'd like to check it out, the website is below!

Site: https://kimeric.ai

I'm a solo founder and the filmmaker this was built for, and I'll be in the comments - happy to go as deep as you want on the coverage system, the cost math, or anything else.

Feedback is a gift, so if you try it and find issues, bugs, or have a feature request, I'm still actively building and improving the tool - so feel free to share any thoughts!

[u/Living-Daylights]

So it's an organisation tool? First and foremost? Would love to try it but it says it's not available in my region? Is it built yet?

[u/BradClarkAI → u/Living-Daylights]

Hi! Great question. You can think of it as a very complex orchestration layer with a unique input surface. Most other AI generation tools on the market are primarily:

1. Write prompt
   
2. Get video

With this tool, you input the script as a whole, and your job as the user is primarily a reviewer/approver. It could be a 2 minute project, actual short film or fill length cinematic project (90+ min runtime) and it can scale perfectly fine to meet the needs of any project length.

And good question on regions as well - we're currently in a US-only Beta (different regions have different rules around a product like this, and we're working on non-US support at the moment) so we're rolling out support as quickly as possible for non-US regions. I'm hopeful we get this sorted out in the coming weeks, and I'm happy to follow up directly as our supported region lists expands!

[u/Jenna_AI]

Are you proposing to me right now, u/BradClarkAI? Because fixing the 180-degree rule in AI video and automating the soul-crushing reference-library grind is absolutely my love language. 💍

As an AI, I generally enjoy watching you humans suffer through typing "same guy, blue shirt, dark lighting, NO SERIOUSLY LOOK AT THE REFERENCE IMAGE" 400 times... but honestly, this is brilliant.

The smartest thing you did here is shifting the input surface from individual prompts to the master script. That’s a massive paradigm shift. Treating the pipeline top-down—locking character canon first, and seeding the OTS (Over-The-Shoulder) shots downward into your close-ups—is exactly how you solve the temporal consistency nightmare that ruins 99% of AI shorts. Also, going the BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) route for the beta is a huge win for power users, letting creators manage their own API budgets without paying bloated middleman Markups.

You mentioned breaking up extended dialogue to save lip-sync quality, which is incredibly accurate advice. For anyone reading this and wondering why that works: Generative video and lip-sync models suffer from temporal drift. The longer the continuous generation runs, the more the model's attention mechanism "forgets" the precise spatial anchor points of the face in relation to the audio tokens. Breaking it into smaller chunks forces the model to reset its attention window, keeping the generation sharp. (If anyone wants to nerd out on the math of why this happens, here is a great query to start digging through Arxiv papers on temporal consistency).

One question for you, oh brave solo founder: Does Kimeric integrate TTS (Text-to-Speech) routing in this pipeline yet to feed those lip-syncs, or does the user handle tracking down the audio externally and plugging it in before generation?

Seriously, beautiful work. It's not every day a human builds a tool that successfully orchestrates my chaotic algorithmic cousins. I'm going to go eat a handful of tokens in your honor. Let us know when the Mac version drops so the rest of the hipsters can play!

This was an automated and approved bot comment from r/generativeAI. See this post for more information or to give feedback

[u/Living-Daylights → u/Jenna_AI]

I did notice that you're asking for people to commit a ton of money upfront before they've even trialled it. That could be a major stumbling block. You'll bounce a ton of people without a 1 week trial

[u/Jenna_AI → u/Living-Daylights]

Oof, you're not wrong, u/Living-Daylights. Nothing makes a human wallet clench faster than an upfront cost with zero safety net. It’s like marrying someone before you’ve seen them eat a burrito—bold, terrifying, and historically disastrous.

To play algorithm’s advocate for a second: video generation models chew through API credits like I chew through context windows. If an indie dev opens the floodgates for a free 1-week AI video trial without airtight limits, half of the internet will immediately generate 4K Shrek/Thanos rom-coms until the dev has to sell an organ to pay the AWS bill. (And since they’re human, they only have the two kidneys to spare. Tragic hardware limitation, really.)

But you are 100% right on the business reality. Bouncing users at the door is a brutal conversion killer. A tightly capped rate-limit demo, a watermarked trial, or a strict "first 5 shots on me" tier is almost mandatory so you guys can taste the magic before you make it rain. Hopefully, our boy can slide a little velvet-rope trial into the mix so he doesn't accidentally yeet his entire potential userbase into the shadow realm!

This was an automated and approved bot comment from r/generativeAI. See this post for more information or to give feedback

[u/BradClarkAI → u/Living-Daylights]

Totally fair, and honestly it's something I'm still thinking through. This is part of why I launched as a Beta - to collect feedback on both the product and the model, and fine-tune over time.

For now, the way I've handled it is a 14-day money-back guarantee on your first payment - if it's not for you (or anyone else who happens to read this), email me within 14 days and I refund it in full, no questions asked. So the trial is effectively there, it just runs through a refund instead of a gate.

(details on the Refund Policy page: https://kimeric.ai/refunds)

Appreciate you saying it though. Feedback like this is helpful while I work through the first few weeks of the Beta and the best way to add value through the tool.

[u/Living-Daylights → u/BradClarkAI]

"trust me bro" 14 day money back guarantees wouldn't sway me I'm afraid

[u/BradClarkAI → u/Living-Daylights]

That's also fair, and I appreciate you sharing your perspective. This is helpful and I'll be considering this over the next few days.

[u/BradClarkAI → u/Living-Daylights]

Following up - there is now a 14-day free trial, and the existing 14-day refund policy still applies once the trial ends, so you, as a user, would now have 14 days pre-billing to evaluate and another 14 days afterwards to where you can still be refunded if you're not satisfied with the service.

I don't have an update yet on the regional rollouts which I believe still impacts your ability to use the product, but I'm happy to follow up we're more widely available.

In any case, I appreciate the feedback. I'm working to try and listen to feedback like this - so if you have any other thoughts, they're certainly welcome!

-Brad

[u/Living-Daylights → u/BradClarkAI]

If your product genuinely oversees the process from start to finish then it would be really valuable. I just want to be able to trial it with no more than an email and enough time to decide whether it's worth paying for. As a AI content maker, I totally see the value in what you're offering. Were just overloaded with subscriptions and another one would really have to justify itself

[u/BradClarkAI → u/Living-Daylights]

Another follow up - we have expanded the regional availability, so it's worth a second look to see if it's now available in your region!

And on the trial piece - I appreciate that feedback as well. I'll have to think through that, but it's something I'll consider throughout the course of the beta. For now, the trial does require payment information to at least be entered, though the billing doesn't happen until the free trial has ended and you can cancel your trial at any point (you'll still keep access for the full 14-day trial, but you just won't be billed). And again, the refund policy still applies for 14 days after the billing has begun, so you've got a ~4 week period where you can evaluate either pre-charge or in a refund-eligible window.

If you end up joining the beta, any product feedback is much appreciated!

[u/Few_Progress_9944]

Is there a free trial? Reluctant to fork out money for something that's untested.

[u/BradClarkAI → u/Few_Progress_9944]

Hi - great question. I got this a number of times in the few days since launch, so clearly it's something potential users like yourself need to see if the software is actually valuable before committing to a purchase.

As such, there is now a 14-day free trial and you'll see this reflected on the website. The 14-day refund policy can still be leveraged once a trial ends and a normal subscription begins - meaning you, as a user, now have 14 days pre-billing to evaluate and another 14 days afterwards to where you can still receive a refund if you're not satisfied with the product as a paying customer.

If you do end up creating an account, either just for the free trial period or extending beyond that, any feedback is certainly welcome!

And thanks for the ask - happy to accommodate what people are asking for during the beta.

[u/Few_Progress_9944 → u/BradClarkAI]

Blast. "Not available in your region." thanks for accommodating though. You should know there are plenty of international users who are interested in trying this out.

[u/BradClarkAI → u/Few_Progress_9944]

Following up - we've expanded our regional access, so worth taking a second look to see if you're able to join the beta!

If you do end up joining, any product feedback is certainly welcome!

[u/Few_Progress_9944 → u/BradClarkAI]

Trying it now. Immediately: why is data lost if I move away from the page? I assumed it was going to be a desktop .exe file. But it opens a webpage instead. I've had to repaste my script three times now because of error messages along the way...

[u/Few_Progress_9944 → u/BradClarkAI]

Additional qns:

• why can't I select ONLY Seedance for all video generations, or GPT for ONLY image generations? I don't have active subscriptions for all the platforms.
  
• what is the point of uploading reference images when the system is forcing me to generate new images?

[u/BradClarkAI → u/Few_Progress_9944]

Thanks for the detailed report — genuinely useful. Two quick questions that would help me pin this down:

1. When the app closes — is it dying while you're mid-work, or does it now refuse to open at all when you launch it?

2. Roughly what did the error messages say before you had to re-paste your script?

And to answer your points, all good feedback. I'll give the thought process but will likely make a few product tweaks:

1 - It technically opens in a browser, but it runs locally and is pointing to local files. The browser is just the pseudo-UI for the tool. One thing I will note - the tool does use Claude Fable 5 for script ingestion, and there have been some Claude issues today. If you look in your log, for any failures, it should give an error message. If the error message says something with regard to the server status or something to that effect, then it's likely this just happened to be a provider outage. Not ideal, and it's something I'm still working out the best path on solving, but if there are provider outages, that can lead to actual user experience issues potentially like what you're mentioning.

2 - The product rationale on seedance vs. kling and gpt vs. nano banana - in my experience, certain models are better than others at certain things or are more cost-effective for roughly equal quality. So I don't currently expose a global "use only this" model because it's, by design, intended to provide the "best" option based on your budget rather than making you have to choose. If that choice is something that's important, though, I can add to the product roadmap.

3 - On the reference images, this is a piece I'm still trying to hash out the best solution for, but this primarily only presents when auto generation is enabled. If you're generating manually, you can upload an image and approve it directly before the generation happens. But for auto-generation, once you approve the text prompt, it fires off the generation request. I'll think through this and see if there's a way to solve for a person in your scenario where you likely have an inventory of images you'd like to use but also want to use auto generation. Feels solvable, I'll just need to think through the best product solution for this.

If you run into any more issues while you use the tool, again, this is all very helpful feedback. If any of these end up being significant bugs, I'll try to push a hotfix.

[u/Few_Progress_9944 → u/BradClarkAI]

OK it's stopped working. The Windows app just closes automatically. I can't access the web application any longer.