Show HN: Making 10-minute AI movies with Claude Code and Higgsfield ($200 each)

A working pipeline for making short films (5–12 minutes, dozens of shots, consistent characters and voices) with Seedance 2.0 (video), Nano Banana Pro (images), Sonilo (music) — all three via Higgsfield's CLI — plus ElevenLabs (voices), Gemini (audio/image QC), and a lot of ffmpeg. About ten films have been made this way; the first complete one, The Long Game (an 11-minute comedy, ~80 shots, ~15 iteration passes), lives in long_game/

as the worked example.

A taste of the output: The Long Game's cast, voices, and start frames, the storyboard, the voice auditions — and the finished film. Two more finished films: Homo Sapien (the music video) and Walter's Deal. There's also a blog post about the whole endeavor: Making AI Movies.

Start with MOVIE_LESSONS.md — the playbook: the pipeline, the laws (retakes regress; after two failed rewordings change what happens; the problem dictates the fix), prompting, voices, sound, and costs. The dated per-project postmortems behind those rules live in

PROJECT_LOG.md.

Anchors (character portraits) → start frames (one per scene, anchors as refs) → cast voices and TTS the script → animatic (the whole film as stills + TTS, ~free — iterate here) → Seedance clips (start frame + anchors + voice refs) → music and ambience as assembler layers → ffmpeg assembly → storyboard.html + preview → director notes → cheapest fix per note → repeat.

gen.py            submit Seedance / Nano Banana jobs (handles the 8-job cap)
tools/
  pool_run.py     batch runner; skips finished shots, so re-run = retry
  assemble.py     spec-driven film assembler (cuts, music spans, ambience
                  beds, grades, fades) — see long_game/film_spec.py
  dub_clip.py     replace a line's audio without re-rendering
  pitch_check.py  median-F0 screen for wrong-voice takes
  listen.py       Gemini listens to audio for QC (fault-finding prompts only)
  templates/      best-of-breed per-film tools to copy into a new project:
                  animatic, auditions, ambience, images, storyboard, batch
                  emitter, frame edits, upscale, dub pass
long_game/        the worked example: story, film_spec.py, storyboard_gen,
                  archive/ of every iteration script (media is gitignored)
other_movies/     the other film projects (sagas, Donner Party, Walter's Deal,
                  the Homo Sapien music video, ...). Copyrighted source texts
                  and a few fan-IP projects are local-only via .gitignore.
veo3_compare/     the std-vs-fast blind test harness + prompts

Prerequisites: Python 3.10+, ffmpeg

/ffprobe

on PATH, Node 18+ for the Higgsfield CLI (npm i -g @higgsfield/cli

— the only path to Seedance 2.0 / Nano Banana Pro), and pip install numpy

(pitch_check). Optional per tool: edge-tts

(free draft TTS), demucs

• Whisper (dub QC).

npm i -g @higgsfield/cli

, thenhiggsfield auth login

&&higgsfield workspace set <id>

; put API keys at~/.elevenlabs_key

and~/.gemini_key

(~/.fal_key

only if using fal.ai as an alternate Seedance provider).- Make a folder, write the treatment, then follow the pipeline order in MOVIE_LESSONS.md — anchors, frames, voices, animatic first. - Copy what you need from tools/templates/

and adapt its spec imports. - Generate clips via a batch script + python3 ../tools/pool_run.py videos_v1.sh outputs/video1 7

, assemble withpython3 ../tools/assemble.py film_spec.py

, review via the storyboard, iterate.

Media (clips, frames, audio, previews) is deliberately not in git — only specs, scripts, and docs. Everything under outputs/

is regenerable from them, credits permitting.