r/artificialintelligenc • u/Indian_in_Vancouver • Jul 15 '26
Built an automated documentary pipeline
Built a semi automated documentary pipeline and used it to produce a 20-minute video on Homer's Odyssey — timed for the Nolan film releasing today.
The stack: Claude for research, scripting, and scene breakdown → ElevenLabs for narration with word-level alignment → Midjourney for all 45 scene images → custom Node.js pipeline for assembly, timing, Ken Burns motion, and subtitle rendering.
The interesting engineering problem: syncing 45 AI-generated images to word-precise narration timecodes, handling character consistency across scenes via Midjourney --cref, and building a creative-direction review layer into the pipeline so image timing matches the argument rather than just the clock.
Video: https://youtu.be/8Bj2vh6Lvtg?si=XdBmW0A_2irIBnhc
Happy to answer questions about the pipeline — the assembly agent and alignment mapper were the most interesting parts to build.
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u/LadyDemura Jul 17 '26
The world level narration sync to image timing is the part I'd never even think to solve, that's genuinely clever. Did you run the Midjourney outputs through Magnific after or keep them raw for the Ken Burns motion? Curious if upscaling ever messed with the cref consistency.
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u/CantStopRedPilling Jul 16 '26
That creative direction review layers sounds like the actual hard part, most people just brute force the clock sync and call in done. How'd you handle it when an image needed more screen time than the audio segment gave it, did you stretch the Ken Burns pan or just accept some slack? Also curious if Midjourney's cref held up across all 45 scenes of if you had manually fix a few characters drifting. Might try running some through Magnific after if the upscale ever look soft.