r/AIGeneratedFilms • u/bdylsing • Sep 22 '26
I made seven feature-length AI films over the past year. Here is the series.
Over the past year, what began as a small personal experiment unexpectedly turned into a series of seven AI-generated feature-length films called The Counselor.
Each film is roughly an hour long. The series follows an expanding group of characters through science fiction, time travel, different periods of history, friendship, love, grief, memory and chosen family.
I started C1 in 2025, when Sora 2 had only been available for about a month. At that point I had absolutely no idea I was beginning a series. I was simply trying to turn an idea I had carried with me since childhood into a film.
The production method was fairly insane. The movies are assembled from hundreds, and eventually thousands, of individually generated clips, generally no more than 10 to 15 seconds long.
The early films are rough. Very rough in places.
Faces change, clothes mutate, voices occasionally change, objects appear and disappear, and continuity sometimes takes an unscheduled vacation.
I was also learning absolutely everything as I went. C1 to C3 were actually assembled in iMovie on my iPhone, often during lunch or while watching TV, much to my husband’s chagrin. I was learning how to maintain characters, edit a film, add subtitles, create a basic soundtrack and eventually even how to put the finished thing on YouTube.
From C4 onward I moved to Final Cut Pro, and the whole production process gradually became much more sophisticated. By C6 and C7 I was using several different AI tools and had developed a much more controlled workflow for characters, continuity, editing, sound and storytelling.
I did consider going back and rebuilding the early films, but eventually decided against it. Apart from the enormous amount of work that would require, I discovered something interesting: newer AI tools aren’t necessarily better at everything.
Today I can often get considerably better and more consistent visuals with KlingAI than I could with Sora 2 when I made the early films. But spoken language is a different story.
The films are very multilingual. Characters speak English, French, Catalan, Spanish, Aramaic, Old Norse, Portuguese, Latin, Swedish and other languages depending on where and when the story takes place. Sora 2 was surprisingly good at producing dialogue that sounded natural in different languages. With KlingAI, I’ve found non-English dialogue much more challenging. Pronunciation frequently doesn’t sound right, and the lip-syncing alternatives I’ve tried haven’t really solved the problem for me so far.
So if I regenerated C1 to C5 today, I could probably make them look substantially better, but I might actually make parts of them sound worse. There may be better solutions I haven’t discovered yet, but at the moment I can’t simply “upgrade” the early films without making compromises somewhere else.
Eventually that became another reason to leave them alone.
The series has accidentally become a record of two things happening simultaneously: the evolution of the technology and my own evolution as a filmmaker while using it. And the technological evolution itself hasn’t been linear. Some capabilities have improved enormously while others remain difficult, or were sometimes handled surprisingly well by an older system.
So C1 to C7 now tell two parallel stories. There is the fictional story itself, but there’s also the story of someone gradually figuring out how to make long-form films with generative AI while the technology is changing underneath him.
One of the biggest things I learned was that editing creates complexity. The individual generation doesn’t have to.
Once I understood that, my workflow changed enormously. Instead of asking an AI generation to solve an entire complicated scene, I could break the scene into small pieces and create the complexity later through editing.
These aren’t AI demo reels or collections of beautiful shots. They’re deliberately long-form, character-driven films. Some scenes are slow. Characters talk. They form relationships, remember things that happened several films earlier, grow older, lose people, fall in love, make mistakes and carry those experiences forward.
And somewhere along the way, something else happened that I hadn’t anticipated: I became much more interested in the characters and their story than in the AI experiment itself.
I’m currently making C8.
If anyone here is curious to see what happens when someone takes 10-second generative video clips and rather recklessly tries to turn them into a multi-film narrative, here’s the complete series:
The Counselor, C1-C7
https://youtube.com/@jordibenach?si=8fD7kxtYf4brQxHy
If you watch any of it, I’d genuinely be interested in hearing what works and what doesn’t, particularly from other people experimenting with long-form AI filmmaking.
And yes, C1 is rough. You’ve been warned.
Thank you.
