I have been spending my nights at the hospital and I won't be able to join the weekly call today. My dad has been recovering really well so by next week everything should be back to normal and I'll be able to see you guys then Like this post to let me know you are aware of this change. I also removed the event from the weekly calendar for today’s call

Some news I'm really proud of: a filmmaker team from Hungary reached out to me to help with Vader https://www.facebook.com/Vaderfilm, a fan-based Star Wars movie. My mission: AI-powered SFX and scene creation. I built a few test scenes for them, from a battlefield crater under crossfire to a lightsaber defense against an electro-charge, and they loved them. So it's official: I'm now part of the team. Fun fact: this push for better tools has always been part of the Star Wars world. Photoshop was co-created by an ILM effects artist, Pixar began life inside Lucasfilm, and George Lucas was one of the biggest forces behind digital cameras, digital sound and digital editing in cinema. He kept pushing new technology to tell better stories. Today, that new technology is AI. AI is not replacing filmmaking here. It's letting a passionate indie team dream at a scale that used to need a Hollywood budget.

This is my second AI short (I have not finish the first one, coming soon!). Hope you like it.

I've been working for months on a teaser for my debut AI-generated feature film, and I'd love feedback from this community. The film is called "Brotherhood in the Bitter Cold" — inspired by the true story of my grandfather, a Transylvanian Hungarian who survived a Soviet labor camp and walked home from Siberia in 1948. The project is part AI experiment, part memoir, part love letter to a man who rarely spoke about what he lived through. WORKFLOW: — Script and storyboard: written by me, based on my novel of the same name (not yet published) — Character references, Cloth Reference, Environment Generation: Nano Banana (Gemini) with family photo references for facial consistency — Video generation: Seedance with detailed per-shot prompts — Narration: ElevenLabs v3 with intention-based tags for an elderly voice — Music: Suno TECHNICAL NOTES: — Maintained character consistency across shots using reference sheets generated in Nano Banana, then reinforced via Img2Vid in Seedance — Developed custom prompt structures for every generation using Claude Desktop with dedicated Skills (one Skill per tool: Seedance director, Nano Banana reference-sheet builder, ElevenLabs voice director, etc.) — Built custom character identity docs for each of the main characters to keep visual continuity across 40+ generations — Aspect ratio 21:9 CHALLENGES: — Facial consistency across long sequences remains the hardest problem — Text generation (carved into wood, etc.) still fails reliably — Period-correct wardrobe required heavy negative prompting (Seedance defaults wanted to add German/Alsatian half-timbering to Eastern European scenes) - Seedance still denies a lot of prompts, especially images with faces — Higgsfield Cinema Studio 3.5 solves this quite well as an alternative - Cost is significant: ~$300+ for 3 minutes of final output (teaser + prologue combined), which is steep for an independent creator. Much of that is re-generations and failed prompts — the "visible cost" is only part of the total spend.

This was a real challenge to do it.It was all easy, until I not faced the dwarfs. I think 2 days I played to avoid the protection of Seedance. Hard work :-) Offer a like on Youtube if you like the result :-)