Visual Cover Production Engine

AI video models can make a good five-second clip, but they are much less reliable at keeping one look across a whole film. So I start from a finished film and remake it shot by shot. The original sets the framing, the blocking, the light, the camera moves, the pacing, and the cuts.

I recast it with historical figures and decide how each part of it translates to their period. Codex carries those decisions through image generation, animation, editing, and fixes, and keeps them consistent from shot to shot.

The original and the remake, in sync

Every cut, camera move, and bit of timing on the right comes from a film that a person already directed, so the AI models don't have to make those choices themselves.

Cleopatra + Antony, Final Film v09

The remake sets all 37 shots of the original in late Ptolemaic Egypt, around 34 BCE. Cars become chariots, a private jet becomes a Nile galley, and electric light becomes sun, fire, moon, or reflected water.

How a film gets remade

1. Break down the original. Every shot gets a written spec: its exact timecode and frame count, the framing, camera, light, action, and how it cuts to the next shot.
2. Settle the look first. The characters' faces, costumes, locations, and the period stand-in for each modern object are approved before any shot that depends on them is made.
3. Make guide frames that protect the original cast. Pixelated frames from the original keep each shot's poses and layout, without passing the original cast's facial details into GPT Image.
4. Generate, then animate. The first frame of each shot has to pass checks for likeness, anatomy, lighting, and composition. Only then does it go to Kling, with a short description of the motion.
5. Reassemble and fix. FFmpeg puts the shots back together at the original timing and native speed. Contact sheets and checks that every file decodes show which shots are weak, so those can be redone without touching the ones already accepted.

Fixing one sequence

One three-shot sequence still looked like it was set in a modern luxury vehicle. I kept the same blocking, moved it into a Ptolemaic chariot house, and regenerated only shots S18-S20. Those 67 frames changed. The other 1,001 frames of the edit kept their accepted versions.

What I did and what Codex did

I chose the source film and the cast, decided how everything would translate to the period, set how close the likenesses had to be, and made the final calls. Codex carried those decisions through GPT Image and Kling, and handled the downloads, the reassembly, recovery, and checking the results.

The finished cut has 37 shots and 1,068 frames at 24000/1001 fps, with no retiming or interpolation.

Pilot 00: Dalí + Picasso, Full Film

The first finished pilot recast a 44-second GQ fashion film with Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso. The Cleopatra film uses the same method it set up: reference images for each character, the original's exact timing, and fixes made one shot at a time while accepted versions stay in place.

Both films were made the same way, so I can reuse the process on the next one. The comparison footage is shown without sound, with source attribution.

Where it started: Einstein + Lincoln

In 2024, I remade the Brad Pitt and George Clooney GQ film with Einstein and Lincoln. I used screenshots from the original as image prompts in Ideogram 2.0, then animated the selected frames with Luma. This was an earlier version of the same idea, before I built the Codex production workflow.

More about Einstein + Lincoln.