Seven generative tools, one pipeline, and a 31-shot short that holds together as a single film.
A single character (Gohan) had to survive a cockpit, a free fall through cloud, and a rise from a cratered intersection without his face, build, or wardrobe drifting between frames. That is the failure point of AI cinema, and it is where this short spent its real effort. The fix was a production bible treated as law: sun camera-right at a fixed angle across every exterior, a locked wardrobe down to the frayed thread on a sleeve patch, fixed location geometry on a real Lower East Side intersection, and prop continuity carried shot to shot. Nano Banana Pro and Nano Banana 2 generated the hero stills against that bible, one anchor frame per beat, so identity was pinned before motion ever entered the picture. Seedance 2.0 and Kling 3.0 then animated each frame, chosen per shot for whichever engine best held faces and physics, with prompts written to protect the still's composition rather than reinvent it. ElevenLabs carried the posthumous letter that the whole short hangs on, generated in blocks so the silences could be cut by hand. Post-production and grading done in Davinci Resolve. Topaz to upscale videos. Claude and custom Claude Skills sat under the production logic, holding the shot breakdown, the per-shot prompts, and the continuity rules in one enforced system. The pipeline existed to serve one demand: continuity that does not break.
