{"slug": "show-hn-making-10-minute-ai-movies-with-claude-code-and-higgsfield-200-each", "title": "Show HN: Making 10-minute AI movies with Claude Code and Higgsfield ($200 each)", "summary": "A developer has built a pipeline using Claude Code and Higgsfield's CLI to produce 10-minute AI movies for about $200 each, with Seedance 2.0 for video, Nano Banana Pro for images, Sonilo for music, ElevenLabs for voices, and Gemini for quality control. The pipeline has generated at least three finished films, including an 11-minute comedy called 'The Long Game,' and the full playbook is documented in MOVIE_LESSONS.md.", "body_md": "A working pipeline for making short films (5–12 minutes, dozens of shots,\nconsistent characters and voices) with Seedance 2.0 (video), Nano Banana Pro\n(images), Sonilo (music) — all three via Higgsfield's CLI — plus ElevenLabs\n(voices), Gemini (audio/image QC), and a lot of ffmpeg. About ten films have\nbeen made this way; the first complete one, **The Long Game** (an 11-minute\ncomedy, ~80 shots, ~15 iteration passes), lives in `long_game/`\n\nas the worked\nexample.\n\nA taste of the output: [The Long Game's cast, voices, and start frames](https://dawndrain.github.io/movie-gen/long_game/), the [storyboard](https://dawndrain.github.io/movie-gen/long_game/storyboard.html), the [voice auditions](https://dawndrain.github.io/movie-gen/long_game/auditions.html) — and [the finished film](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q40M08SOhGs).\nTwo more finished films: [Homo Sapien](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlP-dhZTQUE) (the music video) and [Walter's Deal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHtF_ApUjRo).\nThere's also a blog post about the whole endeavor: [Making AI Movies](https://dawndrain.notion.site/Making-AI-Movies-39cbb81dad798077b43adcd96e3ebe75).\n\n**Start with MOVIE_LESSONS.md** — the playbook:\nthe pipeline, the laws (retakes regress; after two failed rewordings change\nwhat happens; the problem dictates the fix), prompting, voices, sound, and\ncosts. The dated per-project postmortems behind those rules live in\n\n[PROJECT_LOG.md](/dawndrain/movie-gen/blob/main/PROJECT_LOG.md).\n\nAnchors (character portraits) → start frames (one per scene, anchors as refs)\n→ cast voices and TTS the script → **animatic** (the whole film as stills +\nTTS, ~free — iterate here) → Seedance clips (start frame + anchors + voice\nrefs) → music and ambience as assembler layers → ffmpeg assembly →\nstoryboard.html + preview → director notes → cheapest fix per note → repeat.\n\n```\ngen.py            submit Seedance / Nano Banana jobs (handles the 8-job cap)\ntools/\n  pool_run.py     batch runner; skips finished shots, so re-run = retry\n  assemble.py     spec-driven film assembler (cuts, music spans, ambience\n                  beds, grades, fades) — see long_game/film_spec.py\n  dub_clip.py     replace a line's audio without re-rendering\n  pitch_check.py  median-F0 screen for wrong-voice takes\n  listen.py       Gemini listens to audio for QC (fault-finding prompts only)\n  templates/      best-of-breed per-film tools to copy into a new project:\n                  animatic, auditions, ambience, images, storyboard, batch\n                  emitter, frame edits, upscale, dub pass\nlong_game/        the worked example: story, film_spec.py, storyboard_gen,\n                  archive/ of every iteration script (media is gitignored)\nother_movies/     the other film projects (sagas, Donner Party, Walter's Deal,\n                  the Homo Sapien music video, ...). Copyrighted source texts\n                  and a few fan-IP projects are local-only via .gitignore.\nveo3_compare/     the std-vs-fast blind test harness + prompts\n```\n\nPrerequisites: Python 3.10+, `ffmpeg`\n\n/`ffprobe`\n\non PATH, Node 18+ for the\nHiggsfield CLI (`npm i -g @higgsfield/cli`\n\n— the only path to Seedance 2.0 /\nNano Banana Pro), and `pip install numpy`\n\n(pitch_check). Optional per tool:\n`edge-tts`\n\n(free draft TTS), `demucs`\n\n+ Whisper (dub QC).\n\n`npm i -g @higgsfield/cli`\n\n, then`higgsfield auth login`\n\n&&`higgsfield workspace set <id>`\n\n; put API keys at`~/.elevenlabs_key`\n\nand`~/.gemini_key`\n\n(`~/.fal_key`\n\nonly if using fal.ai as an alternate Seedance provider).- Make a folder, write the treatment, then follow the pipeline order in\nMOVIE_LESSONS.md — anchors, frames, voices,\n**animatic first**. - Copy what you need from\n`tools/templates/`\n\nand adapt its spec imports. - Generate clips via a batch script +\n`python3 ../tools/pool_run.py videos_v1.sh outputs/video1 7`\n\n, assemble with`python3 ../tools/assemble.py film_spec.py`\n\n, review via the storyboard, iterate.\n\nMedia (clips, frames, audio, previews) is deliberately not in git — only\nspecs, scripts, and docs. Everything under `outputs/`\n\nis regenerable from\nthem, credits permitting.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-making-10-minute-ai-movies-with-claude-code-and-higgsfield-200-each", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/dawndrain/movie-gen", "published_at": "2026-07-20 13:57:44+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-20 14:26:26.763100+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "generative-ai", "ai-tools", "ai-products", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Claude Code", "Higgsfield", "Seedance 2.0", "Nano Banana Pro", "ElevenLabs", "Gemini", "ffmpeg", "Sonilo"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-making-10-minute-ai-movies-with-claude-code-and-higgsfield-200-each", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-making-10-minute-ai-movies-with-claude-code-and-higgsfield-200-each.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-making-10-minute-ai-movies-with-claude-code-and-higgsfield-200-each.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-making-10-minute-ai-movies-with-claude-code-and-higgsfield-200-each.jsonld"}}