Since Apr 2026 · Trending
Thirty seconds, fifty references
One-take scenes, dozens of references, and the first festival features.
Clips reached thirty seconds in a single take and models accepted dozens of references at once: images, video clips, audio, even documents. With that much control in one generation, the first feature-length films made this way premiered at festivals, and a single filmmaker could carry a whole short from character sheet to final cut.
Tutorials7
Creating an AI short film, full workflow: character, location, coverage, dialogue, story with Claude, consistent voices
Runway · YouTube · Aug 2026
How it works
- Seedance 2.5: thirty seconds in one pass plus multi-round extension, up to thirty images, ten videos and ten audio references, timestamp-level edits.
- MiniMax H3 (open base weights), LTX-2.5 (ten seconds in under seven seconds) and Wan 3.0 (thirty-second single pass, documents as references) fill out the field.
- Runway Aleph 2.0 and Edit Studio: edit one frame and the change propagates across a thirty-second multi-shot.
- The full short-film pipeline, as Runway teaches it: build the character, design the location, generate coverage, add characters to the scene, direct dialogue and performances, develop the story with Claude, keep the voices consistent.
- Feature-length: Hell Grind at Cannes (95 minutes, 15 people, 14 days; 16,181 generations for the first 25 minutes) and Blomkamp's NIGHTBORNE with 32 real faces and voices as references.
- Act it yourself: film the performance on a phone, transfer it with Kling Motion Control, add lip sync with Seedance, all inside one router app such as Magnific or invideo (techhalla, Uncanny Harry).
Example Films13
More making-ofs1
How films were actually made, from the people who made them.
Related on the timeline6