How to make a 30 or 60 minute movie with AI

To make a 30 or 60 minute movie with AI, start from a finished text, not a prompt. With a narrator, film runs at about 150 words a minute, so half an hour is a story of about 4,500 words and an hour is about 9,000. Draw every character and every place once, make every shot from those drawings so the cast stays the same to the last minute, review the whole film as a storyboard with the voices, and only then animate it. We have made two hour-long films this way, both Sherlock Holmes stories, and posted each on YouTube in two parts.

Your first trailer is free.

Last updated 11 October 2026

How to make a 30 minute movie with AI

Start from about 4,500 words of text: a long short story, or three chapters of a book. With a narrator reading the prose, that runs to about 30 minutes. Paste it in one go, approve the cast, the places and the voices once, review the whole film as a storyboard, then animate it. Our nearest example is Pride and Prejudice, chapters four to six: one episode of 27 minutes in felted wool.

How to make a 60 minute movie with AI

Start from about 9,000 words: a long short story or a novella. It still fits in one upload, which takes up to 10,000 words. The Red-Headed League is 9,109 words, and our film of it runs 60 minutes and 44 seconds. An hour asks everything half an hour asks, for twice as long, so the cast and the places are fixed before the first shot is drawn. We posted ours on YouTube as two parts, 33:18 and 25:28.

Long films we have made

Every film below was made by our studio from the original text, with a narrator reading the prose and each character speaking their own lines. All of them are free to watch on YouTube.

Put minute fifty of The Red-Headed League next to minute one: the same Holmes in the same chair, in the same sitting room, and Jabez Wilson's red hair the same at minute twenty as at minute ten. That is the whole difficulty of a long AI film, and it is solved before a single shot is animated.

How long your text runs on screen

Length comes from the words, not from a setting. With the narrator reading the prose between the speech, film runs at about 150 words a minute: across our own films we measured 34 to 43 seconds for every 100 words. The Red-Headed League is 9,109 words long, and our film of it runs 60 minutes and 44 seconds.

Turn the narrator off and only the dialogue is spoken; the rest plays as pictures, so the same text makes a shorter film. Pride and Prejudice, chapters four to six, runs 27 minutes with the narrator on.

What has to stay the same for an hour

A clip can look good on its own. An hour only works if hundreds of shots look like one film. Five things have to hold, and each is fixed once, at the start:

• The faces. Each character is drawn once, as a sheet you approve. Every shot is then drawn with that sheet given to the model as a picture, never from a written description alone, so the person in minute fifty is the person from minute one. A character in other clothes is a named version of the same person.
• The places. Each location is built once as a set and then seen from different angles, so the sitting room at Baker Street is the same room every time Holmes comes home.
• The objects. A thing that comes back, a letter, a lamp, a hat, gets its own sheet the first time it appears.
• The voices. Each speaking character keeps one voice for the whole film. You pick it from five auditions, each reading a line from your text.
• The look. One look for the whole film: claymation, felted wool, comic book ink, acid pencil, or cut paper.

More on the first of these, and how to test a tool for it in five minutes: how to get consistent characters in AI video.

How to do it

1. Pick the text. A story, a run of chapters or a script that you have the right to adapt: your own work or a classic in the public domain. About 4,500 words for half an hour, about 9,000 for an hour.
2. Paste it. Open Long-form Video and paste up to 10,000 words at a time. Nima reads it and maps the scenes, the cast and the places. Nothing is cut unless you agree.
3. Pick a look. Nima can draw your lead character and your main location in all five looks so you compare them side by side.
4. Approve the cast and the places. Leave a note on any picture and Nima redraws it. This is the step that keeps an hour consistent, so take your time over it.
5. Pick the voices. Five auditions per speaking character, each one reading from your book.
6. Watch your free trailer. 15 to 20 seconds of your story, animated: a check of the look and the voices before you commit to the long film.
7. Plan the film in chat. Tell Nima where the film starts and ends, and whether you want it as one film or in parts.
8. Review the whole film as a storyboard. Every scene is built with the voices before anything is animated. Leave notes on any scene in each round your plan includes.
9. Approve and render. Each shot is animated and the film is put together in order. You get an email with a link to share it, and vertical clips cut from it for TikTok, Reels and Shorts.

One film, or parts?

Either. On YouTube we post an hour as two parts of 25 to 34 minutes, each with its own title, thumbnail and place in a playlist, and we run Pride and Prejudice as episodes of 8 to 28 minutes, one to three chapters at a time.

A longer book goes the same way, a few chapters per upload, because one upload takes up to 10,000 words. A whole novel becomes a series: an 80,000-word novel is close to nine hours of film.

Doing it with general AI video tools

You can make a long film by generating clips one at a time, too. The work moves from making shots to keeping them alike. At 5 to 10 seconds a shot, half an hour is 180 to 360 shots, and an hour is twice that. If you go that way:

• Write and time the script first, at about 150 words a minute, so you know how many shots you are signing up for.
• Make one reference picture per character and per location, and give it to every shot. A tool that cannot take a reference picture cannot hold a face for an hour; which tools can.
• Keep a shot list that records which references each shot used, so a redo in week three matches week one.
• Record every voice for the whole script in one go, so a character sounds the same in part two.
• Cut on a timeline and fix one shot at a time, without regenerating its neighbours.

What it costs

Films are made on a monthly plan metered in minutes of finished film: two, ten or a hundred minutes a month, with one, two or five rounds of notes on each film. Extra minutes are $10 each and never expire. That works out from as low as $10 per finished minute; the plans and their current prices are on the pricing page. Film length follows the text at about 150 words a minute with the narrator on.

A 30-minute film uses 30 minutes of a plan. The largest plan makes a hundred minutes a month: enough for an hour-long film with room to spare. The first trailer is free.

You need the right to adapt the text. Your own book qualifies, and so does anything in the public domain. If a publisher holds your film or audio-visual rights, ask them before you post a trailer.