Where AI needed guidance, and where I had to compromise the vision
ChatGPT made warm, natural family scenes. Gemini won’t make videos from images with children in them, so those scenes stay as stills, or the dog and the grown-ups carry the moment.
Both tools sometimes swapped people for entirely different people, mid-scene, between versions.
Hands that rotated in ways hands don’t, and prompts taken a little too literally. Every film was watched frame by frame before it was used.
Not every flaw was fixed. Where another render would have cost more in credits than it added to the story, we accepted the edit and moved on. That was a human call too.
“Input blocked: Sorry, we can’t create videos from inputs containing photorealistic children.”
Story 05: the key boxes, and a hand we kept
Hannah leaves her phone in locker 14 at the ferry office. The key boxes took three goes to look like something an island harbour might really have, and one version gave her an extra hand. In the short film, the hand passing the key isn’t quite right. Another render might have fixed it, or broken something else. It stayed.
Two jokes that didn’t make the cut
I have a slight Budgy Smuggler obsession, and I’m often seen in them. The plan was for every water scene in the book to feature a pair, as a running joke. After rendering them, I realised it was too much, and most of them went. The dare, a lovely moment of jumping into the river, stayed in the book, but had to stay a still in the film: Gemini wouldn’t animate it.
For the Dome, the night swimmer was a nod to a famous fragrance advert, set in Germany rather than on the Med. I iterated far too many times. He stayed in the book as a bit of cheeky eye candy, and never made it into a film.
The limits we hit
Most of the week was spent waiting: for daily limits to reset, for clips to render, for uploads to go through. The actual making was the quick part. Planning around the ceilings became part of the schedule.
Our plan allowed twenty a day, so the films were made in daily batches, best scenes first.
Image generation was rationed by day too, which made every brief count.
We never hit a usage limit, but long sessions were condensed to fit its working memory, and small details were sometimes forgotten. The files, not the chat, stayed the source of truth.
Even publishing had a ceiling: the films went up over more than one day.
