AI Filmmaker Spent $4.5k and 847 Takes to Make a 22-Minute Short with Seedance
DavidmComfort · x · 2026-09-14
Filmmaker CharlieD released TALES OF GRIMWICKE — Chapter I, a 22-minute AI fantasy animation, and shared the full production breakdown:
- Primary model: ByteDance's Seedance 2.5 (via Segmind), generating 847 takes — mostly 30-second multi-shot prompts — totaling 5 hours of footage; 127 clips made the cut at $4.5k in generation costs, four weeks from first take to publish.
- Characters & locations: built in Midjourney; the author found MJ's cinematography and art direction clearly better than Nano Banana or GPT Image for location plates.
- Editing pipeline: Nano Banana (via fal) edited the plates, built anchor frames, and converted MJ characters into turnaround sheets; framing and camera work were largely left to Seedance, which gave the best results.
A concrete, reproducible workflow for long-form AI video with real cost and timeline numbers.
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