Topview’s New Drama Studio Lets You Create Episodic AI Dramas

The world’s “first AI feature film” just premiered in Cannes. Two years ago, that news would have been a joke. Today, it is a legitimate press release.

It’s crazy to think how much improvement has happened in the past couple of years. We went from blurry six-second clips with melting faces to coherent multi-shot scenes with synced lip movements and consistent characters.

Productions that used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars can now be matched, in look and feel, by one person with a laptop in a single afternoon.

People keep asking me how those Hollywood-level AI short films are made. So in this guide, I am going to walk you through the exact steps using Topview’s newest feature, Drama Studio, and show you the seven-minute K-drama episode I generated with it.

Let’s get started.

What is Drama Studio?

If you open Topview today, you will see a new tool on the left side panel called Drama Studio. It is a dedicated dashboard for building drama scenes, either as a one-off episode or as a full series.

Topview’s Drama Studio dashboard. Image by Jim Clyde Monge

You can upload your own script, drop in a novel, paste a story idea, or let the AI brainstorm a plot from a single sentence. The agent then helps you develop characters, lock in dialogue, and shape the narrative beat by beat.

A few things make this feature stand out from the regular text-to-video flow on Topview:

Character consistency is built in. Once you generate a character, that same face, hair, and outfit carries across every scene you create
The script editor lives next to the video generator. You can rewrite a line of dialogue and regenerate just that shot without rebuilding the whole episode
Multi-episode mode keeps continuity. The system remembers your characters and locations between episodes, so you do not start from zero each time
Storyboards come before video. You can preview each shot as a still image first, fix anything weird, then commit credits to the actual video render

Generating video burns more credits than generating an image, so being able to lock the shot composition before you spend on motion is a big quality-of-life upgrade.

How to Create a Drama Series

Time for the actual walkthrough. I want to show you how to build a short series without uploading an existing novel or script, just to demonstrate how far the AI brainstorming part can take you.

Click on Start from scratch, and you will land on the dashboard below.

Topview’s Drama Studio story creation dashboard. Image by Jim Clyde Monge

You will see a handful of templates to start with. Live action, animation, or your own custom style. For this example, I went with a modern K-drama because the romance genre gives the AI a clear emotional arc to work with.

Next, set the basics:

Aspect ratio (9:16 for shorts, 16:9 for cinematic)
Language (Still in English, so it’s easier to understand)
Duration per episode
Single episode or multi-episode

There is also an advanced settings panel where you can pick the target audience, the genre, and the trope.

Topview’s Drama Studio story creation settings. Image by Jim Clyde Monge

Once you are happy with the configuration, click Confirm and Start Creating.

The next screen asks for the plot. This is where storytelling matters more than prompting tricks. The richer your premise, the better the agent can generate scenes with real emotional weight.

Here is the story I gave it:

A Korean office worker keeps seeing the same foreign man at the last train every night. They never talk, but they slowly notice small things about each other. One night, she misses her stop after falling asleep, and he wakes her up. That small moment starts a quiet romance, but she later finds out he is leaving Korea in seven days.

Of course, you can be as creative as you want with the storyline.

Here is what the AI generated for episode one:

Topview’s outline and script page. Image by Jim Clyde Monge

Here’s the full story of episode 1:

Yuna's eyes snap open — the station name on the overhead panel is already two stops past Hongdae. 
A quiet tap on her shoulder: the foreign man she has watched in silence for weeks is standing over her, pointing at the map, already moving toward the doors. 
He steps off without a word. She rides back alone, one hand pressed to her sternum. 
[Stage Goal: bridge the distance before the clock runs out]

The next evening she sits one seat closer. 
He shifts to face forward, hiding a small smile. 
Over nights three and four the silence between them gains texture through a single shared glance when a drunk passenger breaks into song, and her handing him a tissue — he takes it with a small, startled bow. Words still do not come, but the gap between them has measurably narrowed.
On night five she spots a folded flight itinerary tucked inside his book: 
one-way departure, seven days from today. When she looks up, he is already watching her. 
Neither of them looks away. Night six: on the platform she walks three steps toward him — the train doors slide shut between them. 
She presses her hand flat against the glass. He mirrors it from the other side. The doors seal. 
[Emotional Beat: near-miss — bittersweet longing tips into urgency]

Night seven. The train is nearly empty. 
Before he can open his book, Yuna crosses the aisle and sits directly across from him — she makes the move this time. 
He closes the book. In careful, deliberate Korean he asks: 'Did you always get off at Hongdae?' She laughs — a real laugh, surprised out of herself. They talk in low voices all the way to the terminus and back, as if speaking too loudly might end it. 
At the final stop he stands, lifts his bag, and pauses. He sets a folded note on the seat beside her and steps through the doors. When the train pulls away she unfolds it: a Seoul café name, a date three months out, and one line in English — 'I come back in the spring. Same seat?' Yuna reads it twice, then looks up at the window — her own reflection looking back, smiling.

The scenes in the story look interesting enough already. The script tracks character development across seven nights, builds physical proximity as a metaphor for emotional closeness, and lands on a satisfying open ending.

From here, you can either keep the AI-generated script or rewrite scenes manually. I left it mostly untouched because the pacing was already solid.

The next step is character and location generation. Episode one needed three characters: Kang Jun-ho, Oh Se-rin, and Yoo Sang-cheol.

You have four options for each one:

Upload your own reference image
Pick from Topview’s character library
Let the AI generate the character from the script
Mix and match (use a reference for face, then tweak outfit and hair)

Topview’s character creation page. Image by Jim Clyde Monge

I really like how the character preview shows a close-up front view plus three full-body poses at different angles. That gives the engine more reference data to keep the character consistent across shots, which is the single hardest problem in AI video right now.

The images Topview generates look so realistic because the engine is using the GPT-Image 2 model.

The same applies to environments and props. You generate preview images for each location (the train car, the platform, the café) before committing them to video. Lock these in early. If you skip this step, your second-episode train interior might look completely different from your first-episode train interior, and the illusion breaks.

Topview’s environment creation page. Image by Jim Clyde Monge

Once characters and locations are ready, go back to the Outline & Script tab and click Enter video production. This opens a new video generation dashboard where you build each scene one by one.

Topview’s final drama video creation page. Image by Jim Clyde Monge

For each scene, you can:

Tag which characters appear
Drop in a storyboard reference image
Add camera and shot-type instructions (close-up, medium shot, dolly in)
Attach a voice or background music reference
Adjust dialogue timing

This is the part where you actually direct the film. The more specific you are at this stage, the less you have to regenerate later. I usually add at least one storyboard image per scene because it locks the composition before the AI fills in motion.

Topview’s final drama video creation page. Image by Jim Clyde Monge

Once everything looks good, click Generate video for each scene. Wait for the render to finish, then export the merged episode as an MP4. Remember that the video generation engine is powered by Seedance 2, so the output is expected to be really good.

Here is what mine looked like:

Watch on Vimeo

Topview’s final output. Image by Jim Clyde Monge

I was so impressed by the final output.

Character consistency held across every scene, the train interior matched between cuts, and the props (the book, the folded itinerary, the note) stayed visually correct from shot to shot.

The realism is the part that caught me off guard. Lighting on faces during the night scenes looked natural, not the usual flat AI glow. The accuracy of text rendering. Dialogue felt grounded, lip movements synced cleanly with the audio, and facial expressions actually carried emotion. Subtle things like a held-back smile or a soft exhale before speaking.

It really does look like a real K-drama episode, not an AI demo.

More Ways to Improve the Scenes

A few tricks that pushed my output from “passable” to “actually watchable”:

Write your own storyline. The AI is good, but it gets better when you bring the specifics. Personal details, regional flavor, and a clear emotional arc are things the model cannot invent for you.
Upload your own audio. Voice references for each character produce far more consistent vocal performances. Background music you pick yourself sets a tone the AI would never default to.
Generate storyboards before video. Burning a few image credits to lock composition is cheaper than burning video credits on a shot that misses.
Use multi-episode mode for longer stories. Adding more characters and stretching the arc across episodes gives you space to develop relationships rather than rushing the payoff.
Extend the scenes when needed. Topview supports up to 20 minutes per episode, which is enough room for a real short film, not just a teaser.

The bigger lesson is that AI video tools reward writers more than they reward prompt engineers. A great script with a thin prompt almost always beats a generic script with a clever one.

Final Thoughts

Alright, you’ve just learned the detailed steps of how AI-generated short films are made. I know, they seem complicated at first, but once you start creating your own, you’ll know how simple it really is. Pick a template, set the basics, feed the AI a premise, lock in your characters, then build the scenes one by one. That is the whole loop.

Now for my honest take. This is the most complete AI short film generator I have used so far. Most platforms give you either a solid video model or a decent script editor, rarely both in one place.

Drama Studio gives you control at every stage. Rewrite a line, swap an outfit, regenerate one shot without breaking the rest of the cut. That kind of flexibility is what makes the difference between a fun demo and something you can actually publish.

Huge props to the Topview team for shipping this. I do not throw around “best in class” lightly, but for AI short films, this is the one I keep coming back to. What’s even better is the fact that what we are seeing now is just the beginning. Voice cloning, longer runtimes, and sharper micro-expressions are all of that is landing soon. The bar keeps rising.

If you have tried Drama Studio or any other AI film creation tool, what worked for you and what didn’t? Let me know in the comments.