By Novae Caelum · Originally published
A year and change and I finally have a system!
Summer of last year, I started building an app. In Loveable, with Sonnet 3.5. It was not a very good app!
But it was the seed of what would become Fiction.show. Which is all the way my baby, built from thousands of hours of AI filmmaking work, starting from the early days of Veo 3 all the way to Seedance 2.5 now.
Last week, I made a 30 minute movie in it with Minimax H3, rolling the initial footage, around 45 minutes worth, in two days.
When I say that’s damn near miraculous, remember that my first by-hand episode of my show last year took me 10 of my hours to 1 finished minute. Uphill in the snow, both ways.
This process for me last week took ~19 hours total, for ~30 finished minutes.
You can watch it here!
The last few days, I dumped everything we learned from making that film back into the app and agent system with two new skills, and today: we launched!
This system isn’t just an app, isn’t just agent skills, and isn’t just an agent—it needs all three.
The app to hold the processes that tell the agent what to do, and to give an interface for interacting with what you’re making.
The skills to give the agent guidance, and provide an adversarial layer that refines and hones what the app’s generators produce into something more organic, fluid, and artistic. Because we are making art here, not just a rigid process!
And the agent to provide the decision layer, to know when things have gone wrong, to have the judgment to take a set of video prompts and make them cinematic.
The agent, once you find your own stride in how you want things to go, can then take that guidance and run at high efficiency and volume—I’ve had the agent running up to 10 scenes at a time successfully, and holding continuity to a high degree. I had it running overnight. I had it running 5-6 hours a day, with me popping in occasionally to guide it.
And now, with Astra on the scene, and likely Opus 5.5 and Sol 6.1 as well, the agents can take over our editing apps like Davinci Resolve and edit this all together for us.
That’s the system I built.
It can work with many different types of workflows—but the parts of it, the app, the skills, and the agent, are the structure that gives it its power.
Not sure how to work with desktop agents? No problem—I taught a class on that last week and that + the notes and transcripts are now up for everyone here.
My full AI filmmaking process class I recorded last month is coming shortly, too—that’s not a class into how to use this app but into the principles and workflows of AI filmmaking itself, which is what this is built on.
I’ve been in the trenches with this for the last year and change, making shows and short films my hand, refining things all the way down. I’ve known that to do this at scale, I’ve needed to make it all faster, and I have.
And I want everyone, absolutely everyone who wants to make a movie or vertical drama to be able to do it, too. Because we’re here with that, too.
I’ve had this app system in private alpha for our Substack paid subscribers for the last few months, and they helped me make it what it is today (thank you!!!), and now it’s time for the doors to open to everyone else.
So Fiction.show Studio system is in public beta, as of today!
And, I’m going to be continually improving the system as we go, rebuilding new workflows as new models come out, as new technology and workflows come on the scenes. This isn’t a static system, either, but evolving as we go.
You can customize almost every prompt within the system, and customize the skills to your own preferences and workflows.
Which I’ll be continually doing for myself, too, as I start ramping up to put out a movie or long form show episode a week shortly.
THIS is where I see the future of storytelling going.
Because we’ve seen that the structures we’ve relied on as fiction authors are changing—Amazon changes the rules, Meta changes the rules, and when it’s easy to get good prose out of AI, and even good plot, that’s no longer the competitive layer, or not just.
I want to be able to release a book in multiple formats and with a movie or vertical drama or show at the same time. That’s the goal I’ve been working toward for over a year, and—it’s here.
It is truly here.
So!!
Come join me in making movies and shows!! It is so addictive, I can’t even. This is all I actually want to do right now. And the ocean is wide, WIDE open.
-Novae