A few days ago I posted a stupid little Batman video I made on Reddit. I say “stupid little Batman video” because that genuinely was what it was. I wasn’t making it for a client, I wasn’t trying to prove some grand point about the future of AI and I definitely wasn’t sitting here thinking, yes, this is the piece of cinema the internet has been waiting for.
I just wanted to make something funny for my girlfriend. The idea was Batman trying to hide from Vicki Vale, that was the intellectual foundation of the project. I thought it was too stupid to share, but then I posted it.
It was really just an experiment to see how close I could get to footage from an actual movie. I also wanted to keep the test reasonably controlled, so instead of making a huge scene with twenty characters, explosions and some poor AI-generated horse growing an extra leg halfway through the shot, I stuck to two characters and one basic environment.
At the time of writing this, it has had more than 240,000 views. I would honestly have been happy if 20 people watched it and said “cool”.
Pushing MiniMax H3 quality on an RTX 3070 8GB — movie screenshots, voice refs + 0.5MP workflow
by
u/justin_wiggins in
StableDiffusion
The real test was not “can AI make Batman?”
AI can make Batman. We are well past that point. The thing I wanted to test was whether I could make something that felt like it belonged in the original movie. Not a cool AI reinterpretation of Batman. Not Batman with random modern armour, glowing blue eyes and seventeen unnecessary metal panels because apparently every AI thinks superheroes need to look like gaming PCs.
I wanted the original movie look. That meant the characters had to look right, the lighting had to feel right and the shots had to feel like they came from the same world.
That is where I realised again that getting a good AI video is not really about finding one magical prompt. The prep work makes a massive difference.
I spent a ridiculous amount of time making character sheets
Before I started generating the actual scenes, I made proper high-quality character reference sheets.
Not just one image. I wanted front views, side views, back views and three-quarter angles. I wanted the costume details to be clear and I wanted the proportions to stay consistent.
Because if you give an AI one blurry picture of Batman and then ask it to show him from behind, it has to invent the back of Batman.
Sometimes it gets it right. Sometimes Batman suddenly has a cape buckle, six shoulder pads and what appears to be a small microwave attached to his spine.
So I tried to remove as much guessing as possible.
I also made rotating versions of some of the character sheets so I could inspect them from different angles.
That probably sounds like a completely unreasonable amount of work for a joke about Batman hiding behind office furniture.
It was.
But it worked.
The stronger the reference material became, the less AI had to invent. That meant the characters stayed far more consistent between shots.
And this is one of the things I think people misunderstand about AI video. The AI is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but you still have to give it something good to lift.
The video was generated locally on my RTX 3070
The other fun part is that I did all of this on my own PC using an RTX 3070 with 8GB VRAM. That card is not exactly sitting at the top of Nvidia’s product page anymore.
But I wanted to see how far I could push the hardware I already have. I generated the clips locally and concentrated much more on quality than speed. Some clips took ages. Sometimes I waited for a long generation only to discover that the useful part was about two seconds long.
That is AI filmmaking at the moment. You wait twenty minutes. Batman walks beautifully into the room. The lighting is perfect. The face is perfect. Then he puts his hand through a desk.
Render again.
The editing is where it started feeling like a real scene
Once I had enough usable clips, I took everything into DaVinci Resolve.
This is the part that I think makes a much bigger difference than people expect. AI can generate some incredible individual shots, but individual shots are not a movie. They are just individual shots sitting in a folder making you feel productive.
You still have to edit them. I had to choose the right moments, cut around the bad bits, fix the timing and get the comedy working. I added the music and worked on the sound so the whole thing felt like one continuous scene rather than a collection of AI generations that happened to contain the same people.
[DAVINCI RESOLVE TIMELINE IMAGE HERE]
The sound was especially important. You can make something that looks incredibly convincing then ruin it instantly with bad audio. Our brains are annoyingly good at spotting when something feels wrong, even if we cannot immediately explain why.
Once the voices, sound and music were sitting properly with the visuals, the whole thing suddenly felt much more like a piece of film.
The funniest part is that people cared about the story
When I posted it, I expected the usual AI questions. What model did you use? How much VRAM? How long did it take? What workflow? And there was plenty of that.
But people also commented on the jokes, the editing and the actual scene.
That interested me much more. Because the technology is obviously impressive, but eventually the technology stops being the interesting part.
If everybody can generate beautiful video, then beautiful video becomes normal. The thing that remains is whether anybody actually wants to watch what you made.
The Batman video worked because there was a stupid little idea behind it. Batman is supposed to be this terrifying mysterious figure who disappears into shadows. My version cannot successfully hide behind a pot plant.
AI made the footage possible, but the reason people stayed was not because they were carefully analysing temporal consistency. At least I hope not.
This was my first proper test
I deliberately kept this one simple. Two characters. Familiar costumes. A basic story and a small number of locations. Now I know much more about what works. Good reference images matter. Character sheets matter. Camera instructions matter. Editing matters. Sound matters. Sometimes changing three words in a prompt matters for absolutely no logical reason because AI likes to keep everyone humble.
The next thing I am working on is considerably bigger. I am currently making a full movie trailer. This time I am treating the whole thing much more like a film production. I have character sheets, environment sheets, props, storyboards, shot plans and reference images for practically everything.
Instead of asking AI to invent the movie as it goes, I am trying to design as much as possible before I generate the actual shots. That has completely changed how I think about this stuff.
I can suddenly see how one person will make a movie
A year or two ago the idea of one person making a convincing feature film at home still sounded a bit ridiculous. Now I genuinely think it is just a question of when. Not because AI is going to magically spit out a perfect two-hour movie from one prompt. I actually think that would be fairly boring.
The interesting part is that one person will be able to do things that previously needed an entire production crew.
You can write the script, design the characters, design the locations, create the shots, generate performances, edit everything and make the music from one room.
That is mad when you actually think about it. There are still plenty of problems. Continuity can break. Faces can go wrong. Characters occasionally forget how elbows work. Background people sometimes look like they are experiencing an entirely different film.
But those problems are getting smaller incredibly quickly. This Batman video was my first proper attempt at seeing how close I could get to a real movie. And the thing that surprised me most was not that the AI could generate the footage. It was that after enough planning, references and editing, I stopped thinking of it as “AI footage”. It just became the scene.
And apparently 240,000 other people were willing to watch Batman hide behind a plant too.
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