More Movie Madness

Hiya, I’m Novae Caelum (he/they/starself), and I’m joining my friend Cassie Alexander on this Substack to braindump publishing and AI movie making processes, too! (You may have seen my videos or movie making stuff around!)

I’m a full time, multi-six-figure a year author, which sounds much more impressive on paper because at the end of the day, I still bring in a low-mid five figure salary from my writing business. Which is one of the reasons I think using AI in indie publishing isn’t just a leg up, but necessary to early and mid business scaling—especially if, like me, you started with zero seed capital, and do not have a parallel job. And already pull 10-12 hour days every day to keep the empire running, even with two assistants to help with it all, and ad help, too. (Hi, hello, my brain is a little crispy!).

And if you’re ambitious AF. (It me.)

I’m also trans, and my mission with my books has always been to bring stories with trans main characters (soooo deeply underrepresented pretty much everywhere) to as broad an audience as possible.

And I’ve been doing that. My strategy is—use every tool that’s available in the most efficient and fun way possible. I’m high Futuristic, high Strategic, and high Ideation (#1), and I’m always going to be chasing after the newest and coolest ways to do what I love.

I’m also an artist (I worked full time for several years as a book cover designer) and I’ve been chasing cinematic everything for years. I dabbled in screenplays years ago—then stopped, because I quickly realized the types of stories I wanted to tell probably wouldn’t get made in Hollywood. Or at least, that it would be a much much longer road than the path to book publishing. And in art, I set my 3D vfx learning aside when I realized just how much work it was for how little actual pay. And how little I wanted to work on other people’s projects until I fell over. (I did fall over. It was not fun.)

But this year?? This year is crazy.

Actually, this month is crazy. In the last month, there have been more leaps in the advances of AI video than like the entire last year. (That’s an exaggeration, but not by much.) Google’s Veo3 came out around a month ago, and suddenly we could make dialogue along with the video. And the video itself is really good. Kling, Hailuo (Minimax), Midjourney, Luma Labs, HeyGen, Higgsfield, and Bytedance’s Seadance all had major updates or came out since then, when there were months between updates before. Runway—while lagging behind on video—has been doubling down on their references system, which is still (kind of reluctantly) the best at getting consistent couples across multiple shots. Flux Kontext image model came out and can also get amazing context consistency.

Midjourney—god, Midjourney. All the sudden we have absolutely gorgeous images that can turn into absolutely gorgeous videos at the click of a button, no video prompt needed, with unlimited generations if you use relax mode.

So, I want to make trans movies. Hollywood is just not going to make big budget tentpole movies with trans leads. So if I want those movies to exist, I’ve gotta make them.

Last week, I looked at my (fairly pricey) subscription to Google Flow, where you can access Veo3 the cheapest, and saw that it was going to renew in a day and I’d only used half the credits. Sooo I dropped my romantasy book The King’s Weaver into Gemini 2.5 Pro and had it start listing all the moments in the book that would do good in a movie trailer.

We then went through those moments a few at a time and turned them into Veo3 prompts.

Here’s an example of one of the prompts:

Scene: A gothic medieval king's study. The tension between the two men is palpable, lit by the fire in the hearth.

Characters: CALEB, the handsome 23-year-old Caucasian man with shoulder length brown hair and spectacles. TOROVAN, the handsome 23-year-old king of South Asian Indian heritage and gray-green eyes, light brown skin, and long black hair pulled back into a tail. He is clean shaven.

Action/Emotion: Caleb steps closer to Torovan, his expression full of fierce conviction and belief. He is trying to bolster the king's shattered confidence. Torovan looks at him, his own eyes filled with a flicker of hope.

Dialogue (Caleb speaking, voice strong and certain): "You have the willpower of a king. You do, Torovan. You have the will."

Camera Shot: A slow push-in on Caleb’s face as he speaks, then a cut to Torovan's face as hope dawns in his eyes.

Style: Epic fantasy, cinematic, detailed, emotionally empowering, warm firelight.

This is mostly Gemini’s prompt, with a few tweaks from me—mostly to copy/paste in my character descriptions so they stay as consistent as possible. Gemini liked to assume Veo3 would just magically carry this character consistency over—ha, it doesn’t. At this time, the only way to get Veo3 to generate the speaking parts, too, is using text-to-speech, so getting character consistency is tricky. But getting close with descriptions and prompt consistency is possible!

I generated a bunch of videos around these moments, then asked Gemini to make a trailer script—it pulled these moments all together, and then I tweaked it quite a bit from there based on my marketing hooks I knew worked.

I generated some more videos to fill out the narrative I wanted to tell in the trailer, then—because I didn’t feel the same cinematic effect from the voices in Eleven Labs—I generated a few more videos just for the voice over. (This…ha…was interesting. There were some lines in my voice over I had to change because it would only generate songs…mostly country songs…with them. For reasons unknown.)

I pulled all of this together in Davinci Studio (the paid version with the extra AI tools) and then generated a Suno soundtrack, and kept going until I found a song that had its breaks and builds right around the right moments in the trailer. (Probably around the seventh or eighth song I tried.)

And finally, I upscaled it all on Topaz Video on my Mac—which I honestly got last week just for the express purpose of upscaling locally like a champ, because Topaz’s Astra, the very best video upscaler out there, is cloud-based and ~ $100/ 8 minutes of upscale. (I’ll have made back the $3K I dropped on my renderbeast of a Mac in several movies’ worth of upscaling, for sure. Also, the option to do NSFW videos is nice!)

This is the final trailer:

I am so ridiculously happy with this.

This looks like a MOVIE. This is going to BE a movie.

And a bunch of my friends and really smart people are convincing me that I don’t need to wait for 100% character consistency to jump in, because the feels are there.

I think they’re right.

SO, you’ll be seeing my movie hacking process as I make it! <3

I also have this uploaded on Creatorwood, Michael Evans’ new author-made movie and TV platform. (I’ve got the only movie and show stuff up yet—come join me pleaaaase I don’t want to be all by my lonesome! Also, it is amazing to see your work in a Netflix-style marquee!)

More from me soon!

-Novae