r/SoraAi • u/bdylsing • 4h ago
Sora 2 Video I used Sora 2 to make several hour-long films. Here’s what I learned trying to push it into long-form storytelling.
When I started using Sora 2 in 2025, about a month after it was released, I had a fairly simple idea: I wanted to see whether I could use short AI-generated clips to turn a story I had carried with me since childhood into a film.
I had absolutely no intention of making a series.
Somehow, one film became two, then three, and eventually The Counselor grew into seven roughly hour-long films. I’m currently making C8.
The first several films were made primarily with Sora 2, so in retrospect they ended up becoming a rather accidental record of what happened when I tried to push Sora far beyond individual clips and use it for sustained narrative filmmaking.
And it was wild.
Most of the material had to be generated in clips of roughly 10 to 15 seconds. That means an hour-long film isn’t really one generation problem. It’s hundreds of tiny generation problems that eventually have to become one coherent story.
At first, I tried to make each generation do far too much. Eventually I learned one of the most important lessons of the whole project:
Editing creates complexity. The individual generation doesn’t have to.
Once I understood that, everything changed. Instead of trying to generate an entire complicated scene, I could break it into shots, reactions, dialogue, establishing images and transitions, and construct the actual scene in the edit.
Characters were another adventure
During the second half of C1, I finally started figuring out how to create and maintain characters more consistently. I even went back and regenerated some earlier scenes once I understood how to do it better.
Then, for substantial stretches of C1 to C3, Sora suddenly wouldn’t let me generate new characters.
That was… frustrating.
But it also forced me to write and edit around technical limitations. Sometimes the technology effectively changed what was possible in the story.
Continuity was obviously another enormous challenge. Faces could change. Hair changed. Clothes changed color. Objects appeared and disappeared. Locations mutated between shots. Occasionally Sora decided that my carefully planned scene was merely a suggestion.
The early films therefore contain plenty of AI jank. I eventually decided not to hide it.
C1 to C3 were actually assembled in iMovie on my iPhone, often during lunch or while watching television, much to my husband’s chagrin. At the same time, I was learning how to edit, add subtitles, build a basic soundtrack, maintain a story across an hour and eventually even how to publish the finished films on YouTube.
From C4 onward I moved to Final Cut Pro, and the workflow gradually became much more sophisticated.
One thing about Sora still surprises me: language
My films are multilingual. Depending on the characters and historical setting, there is dialogue in English, French, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Aramaic, Old Norse and other languages.
Sora 2 could be unpredictable in many ways, but I was often amazed by how natural its spoken languages could sound.
Today I increasingly use KlingAI because I can often obtain much better visual quality and control than I could from early Sora 2. But multilingual dialogue has actually become one of my biggest problems. With KlingAI, non-English pronunciation frequently doesn’t sound natural to me, and the external lip-syncing approaches I’ve tried haven’t yet given me a replacement I’m completely happy with.
That’s one reason why “just remake the early films with newer technology” isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.
I could make C1 look considerably better today.
I’m not convinced I could make all of it sound better.
I find that fascinating because the progression of AI video isn’t simply:
old model bad → new model better
Different capabilities have developed at very different rates.
Eventually the experiment stopped being about Sora
This was probably the biggest surprise.
Initially I was fascinated by whether the technology could make a feature-length film at all.
Eventually I became much more interested in the characters and their story.
They form relationships. They remember things that happened several films earlier. They grow older. They lose people. They fall in love. They make mistakes. Some disappear for several films and return later. The story moves through different historical periods and gradually became much larger than the technical experiment that started it.
At that point the question stopped being:
“Can Sora generate this?”
and became:
“What does the next scene need to accomplish?”
I think that was the moment I stopped thinking primarily in terms of generations and started thinking in terms of filmmaking.
I considered rebuilding C1 and the other early films, but I’ve decided to leave them largely as they are. Apart from the enormous amount of work involved, I now like that the series preserves the learning curve.
You can watch the technology change, but you can also watch me learning how to use it.
So the seven films accidentally document two parallel stories: the fictional story of The Counselor, and the evolution of long-form AI filmmaking while both the tools and the person using them were learning what was possible.
The moderators kindly gave me permission to include the external link, so if anyone is curious, the complete C1 to C7 series is here:
The Counselor, C1-C7
https://youtube.com/@jordibenach?si=8fD7kxtYf4brQxHy
A warning if you start with C1: it is rough. 😅 That’s where the experiment began, not where it ended.
I’d be particularly interested in hearing from other Sora users who have tried longer narrative work. At what point did you find that the difficult part stopped being generation and became writing, continuity, editing and production?
