July 12, 2026

Introduction

I recently saw this head-to-head between Claude Fable and Claude Opus, where both acted as mini movie directors:

space_worm_battle.mp4

It seems like a pretty epic upgrade! And it made me want to try making my own movie. This is Claude writing prompts to the video generation model Seedance 2.0, using Higgsfield as the API wrapper for Seedance. After using these tools a bit more it turns out that this result is at least somewhat fake in that Fable isn’t actually a dramatically better director than Opus or something. I believe the result is real insofar as it’s definitely possible to get outputs like these.

The Long Game

I had played with Veo 3 last year when it came out and made this really fun video, out of completely disjointed eight-second clips. This seemed like a good time to revisit, and to try and make something more cohesive.

I recently wrote this story based on this “speedrunning the tech tree” idea that I’ve had mulling around, and I felt like it would be a pretty good fit for one of these movie generation models.

Here’s the result!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q40M08SOhGs

Overall it took something like fifteen iterations to get my movie into this state. The story itself started with a two-page prompt, evolved over a brainstorming session with Claude, and then went through five iterations as a cohesive work, the last of which was mostly asking Fable to clean up inconsistencies that had crept in across revisions.

A Recipe for Making a Movie Using AI

At a high level the pipeline is to:

  1. Grab some preexisting story (or song I suppose), which of course you can make yourself
  2. Turn that story into a scene-by-scene script for a movie using Claude Code
  3. Make reference pictures for your characters and scene locations using nano banana
  4. Generate frames for each of the scenes, building on the reference pictures, and assemble them into a storyboard
  5. In addition to (having Claude) write prompts for those frames, you should separately have prompts for the clips themselves, including the dialogue