Introducing Book‑to-Movie: Turn a Whole Novel Into a Film

Today, we're announcing Book‑to-Movie, our new project under development at Video Software Lab. Upload a novel — a .txt, .docx, or .pdf — press one button, and a few minutes later you get back a two‑minute movie: real generated video clips, a single narrator voice, and an original score, all cut together automatically.

The one big idea: aggressive condensation

A novel is 80,000 words. A watchable short is a couple of minutes. Book‑Movie condenses the entire book to roughly fifteen story beats and tells them through a narrator over the visuals — deliberately sidestepping the hardest, most expensive parts of filmmaking (per‑character voice casting and lip‑sync) while still producing genuine moving video rather than a slideshow.

How it works

Read → condense → plan shots → design style/character anchors → film each shot as real image‑to‑video → record narration → score the music → final cut in FFmpeg → one MP4. Three kinds of AI do three jobs: an LLM writes and plans, a generative media engine produces everything you see and the music you hear, and a text‑to‑speech voice narrates it.

Built to always finish

A run always ends with a finished movie or a clear error, and never hangs. A failed shot holds a still; a failed score plays silent — every stage degrades gracefully (Demo: Lieutenant Henry Gallant.)

Now with real creative control

New Advanced settings: a Movie length slider (30 s–50 min), a Background music volume slider (0–100%), free‑text Visual style, plus shot count/length, narrator voice, and swappable models. We also just tightened visual coherence so establishing shots look like scenes, not portraits trying to become one. GitHub repository.