Turning Any Story Into a Short Drama Video with AI — A Practical Workflow

Xu Liu — Sat, 23 May 2026 16:49:34 +0000

If you've ever wanted to turn a short story, a chapter from a novel, or even a fanfiction snippet into a full short drama video — without learning Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, or a TTS pipeline — the AI tooling has finally caught up.

This post walks through a practical end-to-end workflow my team has been iterating on for the past few months.

The 5 hard problems of story-to-video

Anyone who's tried this manually knows the painful parts:

Character consistency across scenes — the protagonist needs the same face, hair, outfit shot after shot. Stable Diffusion alone drifts.
Scene segmentation — turning a paragraph of prose into a sequence of visually coherent storyboard panels.
Voiceover variety — narrator vs. character dialog, with distinct voices that don't sound robotic.
Style choice — realistic vs. anime vs. Ghibli vs. cinematic — each requires different prompt grammar and model weights.
Stitching — pulling images, voice tracks, and subtitles into a final timeline.

Solving any one of these is a weekend hack. Solving all five end-to-end is what makes a real product.

A workflow that actually scales

The pipeline I've settled on:

Story text
    │
    ├── LLM pass 1: characters + visual identities
    ├── LLM pass 2: scene breakdown (storyboard JSON)
    ├── Image gen per scene (reference-locked for character consistency)
    ├── TTS per character (multi-voice)
    └── Render: subtitles + transitions + BGM

Pass 1 is the unlock. You ask the LLM to read the whole story and emit a JSON like:

{
  "characters": [
    {"name": "Anna", "age": 28, "hair": "short black bob", "outfit": "navy trench coat", "voice": "female_warm_alto"},
    {"name": "David", "age": 35, "hair": "messy brown", "outfit": "gray hoodie", "voice": "male_low_thoughtful"}
  ]
}

Then every scene render gets the character's identity sheet appended to its prompt. That's how you keep the same face from scene 1 to scene 30.

Pre-built option

If you don't want to build this yourself, StoryIntoVideo is the pre-built version of basically the same pipeline. Paste a novel chapter, pick a style (realistic, anime, Ghibli, cinematic, oil painting, watercolor), and it does all of the above — character extraction, storyboard, multi-voice narration, render. Free tier exists for trying it on a chapter or two before committing.

I keep coming back to it for two reasons: character consistency across long stories actually holds, and the voice-per-character thing is automatic — no manual per-line voice tagging.

What I'd still love to see improved

Editable storyboards before render — preview the JSON, tweak one scene's prompt, re-render just that scene.
Custom voice cloning with 30s samples.
Longer outputs — most tools cap at ~5 minutes; novel chapters often need 10+.

If you're playing with this space, the bottleneck right now isn't generation quality — it's the orchestration layer. That's where most of the magic happens.

Curious what others are using. Drop your stack in the comments.

I built an AI Contract Generator so freelancers stop drafting NDAs at 1am

Xu Liu — Wed, 20 May 2026 06:03:26 +0000

Why I built it

A freelancer friend lost a four-figure project because the client ghosted right after the work was done — no NDA, no signed service agreement, just a Slack thread and good faith. Lawyers wanted $300+ to draft a one-page NDA. Templates from random PDF sites were either out of date or copy-pasted to the point where their clauses contradicted each other.

So I built AI Contract Generator — a free AI contract generator tool that turns plain-English descriptions into a real, downloadable PDF contract in about a minute.

What it actually does

You describe what you need in natural language:

"Two-month service agreement between me (freelance developer) and an early-stage startup, net-15 payment terms, mutual NDA on tech stack details, 30-day kill-fee clause."

The AI picks the right template (service / NDA / employment / partnership / rental), drafts the clauses, and drops you into an inline editor where you can change names, dates, payment terms — anything — and export to PDF.

Why I bothered

Most "free legal template" sites are SEO traps. You search "free NDA template", land on a PDF that:

has a placeholder city in California even though you're in the UK,
references "Exhibit A" which doesn't exist,
has the wrong jurisdiction in the dispute resolution clause.

I wanted a tool where:

You don't need to know legalese. Describe the situation in your own words, the AI translates.
The output is editable. Generated clause too aggressive? Edit it inline. Want to soften the kill-fee? Change one line.
It's actually free to try. No card before you see the output.

The stack (for the dev nerds)

Next.js App Router on the front
LLM orchestration with structured output for clause generation (so the JSON schema is enforced, not vibes)
PDF rendering server-side so layout stays consistent
Inline editor synced back to the contract JSON so "edit then export" round-trips cleanly

The trickiest part wasn't the model — it was the constraint encoding: making sure when someone says "net-15 payment, late fee 1.5% per month", the resulting clause reads as a real lawyer would write it, not as ChatGPT word soup.

Who it's for

Freelancers who need NDAs and service agreements without paying $300/contract
Landlords drafting rental agreements
Founders sealing partnership / employment deals
Small business owners who need a contract today, not in two weeks

Try it

It's free to try — no signup wall before the first contract. If you've ever spent an hour copy-pasting clauses out of a PDF you don't trust, give it a go: contractgenerator.net.

Feedback welcome — what contract types do you want next? I'm reading every comment.

Building this in public — follow along for more notes on AI + legal tooling.

DEV Community: Xu Liu