Since May 2025
The series and the micro-drama line
Recurring casts, episodes on a schedule, and China's industrial short-drama pipeline.
Once characters held, makers started shows. Neural Viz built an entire universe of recurring characters; by 2026 series like NIGHT DRIVE, Exile Protocol and Bambi the Destroyer posted episodes on a schedule, and Wonder TV and Dreamina Originals became labels for them. In China the same tools became a production line: hundreds of thousands of AI short dramas on Douyin in 2026, made by small teams for a few dollars a minute, and most of them losing money.
Tutorials2
How to make a TV show with AI, using Claude Opus 5.5
Mariana Montoya · YouTube · Oct 2026 · 9:09
Opus 5.5 and Higgsfield take a series from concept to characters to scenes.
How it works
- Build the cast once: character sheets and fixed voices that the episodes reuse.
- Build the sets once, as references or a world you can walk, so locations recur.
- Write in episodes with a language model that keeps the series bible, and generate scenes rather than shots.
- Run it as a line: one person writes and directs the prompts, another generates, a third cuts; an agent can now hold the bible and route the shots.
- Publish on a schedule, and let the audience decide what continues.
Example Films3
More making-ofs1
How films were actually made, from the people who made them.
Related on the timeline3