Somehow My AI Film Turned Into a Platform
For the last seven months I’ve been building Lumarka, a platform that sits between AI video generators and actually making a movie with AI. It’s ambitious. I probably bit off more than I can chew. But the journey taught me something I didn’t expect. I started with n8n. Built two or three dozen workflows. Got pretty good at it. But somewhere along the way I noticed something: most of my workflows were basically code with a visual wrapper. I was writing logic, handling edge cases, debugging errors… just through little boxes instead of text. And at some point I had this very simple thought: why am I adding this extra layer at all? With Claude Code, I can work directly with the source. No translation layer. No dragging nodes around to represent logic I could just write. When something breaks, I’m not debugging a workflow and the code inside it, I’m just debugging code. When I want to change something, I change it. The feedback loop is tighter. The power is more direct. Don’t get me wrong, n8n still has its place. Modular automations, swapping tools in and out, quick experiments… it’s great for that. I still use it. But for building an actual product? Working directly in code with Claude as my partner is just on another level. What really blows my mind is that I’m even able to say this. For most of my career, “code” might as well have been hieroglyphics. I avoided it. It felt like a different species of thinking. I never imagined I’d understand what was going on under the hood, let alone enjoy it. I’m still lost sometimes. But now when I hit a wall, I have a partner who explains what’s happening in plain English, and I push through instead of bouncing off. That alone feels like a small miracle. So what does this have to do with AI filmmaking? At first glance this probably sounds like a nerdy tooling story. But for filmmakers, this shift is actually about something much simpler: creative control and speed. Right now most AI filmmaking workflows are fragile. You bounce between tools, UIs, prompts, formats, and half the time you’re fighting the software instead of shaping the story. Every extra layer adds friction. Every abstraction hides what’s really happening.