Dauntless

TALES OF GRIMWICKE — Chapter I is 22 minutes of AI fantasy animation inspired by the many anthropomorphic animal stories I read as a kid, with a dark twist: The model: Seedance 2.5 (@ByteDanceSeed_ ) via @Segmind_ai. 847 takes generated, mostly 30-second multi-shot prompts, over 5 hours of footage. 127 clips made the cut. About $4.5k in generation, four weeks from first take to publish. Characters and locations came out of @midjourney. Using MJ for the location plates was a revelation: the cinematography and art direction are a level above, and it renders far better as a plate than Nano Banana or GPT Image. Nano Banana (@GoogleDeepMind run on @fal) did the heavy lifting editing those plates, building anchor frames and turning MJ characters into turnaround sheets. Then I let Seedance do as much of the framing and camera operating as possible. That gave the best results. A lot of what I do in my Unreal Engine films came with me: a handheld, imperfect camera operator instead of smooth moves, focus hunting, and above all weather and atmospherics. The model does water, snow, smoke and rain really well, and leaning into that is what keeps it from looking like a Temu Pixar film. The tools I built: a portal (Node on @flydotio) that holds the bible, the refs, every prompt and every take, with a Claude agent (@claudeai) that writes the prompts to the house rules. A Premiere Pro (@AdobeVideo) panel that browses the archive, drops selects on the timeline, versions the project, strips music, and sends fixes back to Seedance. Everything is done in 720p with no upscaling, because it looks terrible. Narration is my own voice through @ElevenLabs speech-to-speech. Music from @Artlist_io. None of this would exist without @PJaccetturo and @Kavanthekid. Their narrative work, Nexus and Chronicles of Bone, proved long-form AI film was possible, and their podcasts, newsletters and X posts, updated constantly as the workflow changes under everyone's feet, showed how to actually do it. Chapter II is currently in the works and I will release it initially on my YouTube channel, The Darkest Age (@CharlieDriscollAI). Consider subscribing there to see it as soon as it drops!