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FilmSkool — a free film school

How to Make Your First AI Short Film (Full Tutorial)

ElevenLabs builds the short film Little Wanderer from one image: exploring cheaply with fast models, structuring prompts, generating stills before video, keeping one character consistent and editing the result.

ElevenLabs · 31 min · Beginner · AIF · AI Filmmaking · 2026

What you take away

Generate still frames first; video from a good still always beats video from text.

Watch it

Filed under

Science fiction to study

Books for the craft underneath

Character Animation Crash Course! — Eric Goldberg
Making Short Films — Clifford Thurlow
Digital Lighting and Rendering — Jeremy Birn
Industrial Light & Magic: The Art of Special Effects — Thomas G. Smith
Prepare to Board! — Nancy Beiman
The Visual Effects Arsenal — Bill Byrne

Run the models yourself

SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE 8TB — Desktop archive drive built for footage
Corsair 128GB DDR5 kit — For Unreal, caches and twelve open applications
Intel Core Ultra 9 285K — Quick Sync, which some codecs still love
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X — 16 cores — the sweet spot for a cutting room
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 — The sensible half-price render card
NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada — Workstation card, single slot, 20GB

More AI Filmmaking

Generate ENTIRE AI MOVIES with this NEW METHOD! [FREE & LOCAL] — Mickmumpitz · 11m · Advanced
How I Made a Short Film with Seedance 2.0 & Kling 3.0 (FULL BREAKDOWN) — Lennard Smith · 29m · Advanced
How To Make Cinematic AI Films With Kling 3.0 (Full Tutorial) — Rourke Heath · 53m · Advanced
This Is Where Filmmaking Is Headed Next (Full Tutorial) — Curious Refuge · 16m · Intermediate
AI Filmmaking Tutorial (Mixed with Real Shot Footage) — Blake Ridder · 11m · Intermediate
I Replaced an Actor With an Alien Using AI (Luma Ray 3.2 Tutorial) — Tim Nagle · 10m · Intermediate
Masterclass: How to use AI for Previz and Storyboarding — Invideo for Filmmaking · 20m · Intermediate
AI Studio Storytellers: HEIST - Turning 3D Previs into an AI Action Film — Reallusion · 9m · Advanced
Create Seamless AI Films of ANY Length (GPT Image 2 + Seedance 2.0) — Tao Prompts · 16m · Intermediate
How to Create Cinematic Camera Movement with AI (Kling 3.0 Masterclass) — Jack Vs. AI · 25m · Intermediate
Masterclass: AI film Directing – Create Stunning Cinematic Shots! — Toby Pointer · 20m · Advanced
The BEST AI Video Lip Sync Techniques (Pro Tutorial) — Curious Refuge · 18m · Intermediate

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