Get ready to watch long-form artificial intelligence (AI) movies and television. One of the clearest previews of AI movies is a free fantasy series called Nexus.
You don’t have to go looking for it. All seven episodes are embedded at the bottom of this article in release order, followed by a short “Inside NEXUS” video about the series.
Its creator is PJ Accetturo, who goes by PJ Ace. His seventh episode, “Dino Demolition Squad,” runs about three and a half minutes and features armored knights, imperial officers and a dinosaur the size of a cathedral.
Here’s the thing: it looks like a studio fantasy epic, and Accetturo says it cost $28,775 to make.
The bigger promise is what the same tools could do at feature length.
Where to watch the Nexus series
You can watch the whole series in one evening, right on this page.
Each episode also lands on the PJ Ace YouTube channel and on X, Instagram and TikTok.
Start with “Wet Markets of Kafar,” the first episode, which has drawn more than 3.7 million views on YouTube. It opens in a fantasy bazaar where traders sell baby griffins and a fire dragon hatchling.
Two episodes carry an Episode 5 label on YouTube, so the videos below follow release order instead.
Who Nexus was made for
Nexus is made for anyone who loves big fantasy franchises.
In a short talk filmed at the Austin AI Film Festival, Accetturo says Nexus borrows the “empire versus the resistance” plot of Star Wars, the fantasy world of Game of Thrones and the creatures with powers from Pokémon.
He says the whole universe grew from one question about what happens when the cutest animal you have ever seen, a baby dragon, is put in danger.
But there’s a catch. Nexus is a partner series with Dreamina, the AI platform that also supplies the tools, so each episode doubles as a showcase for its software.
Accetturo says the episodes introduce characters from a larger Nexus feature film in development.
How AI movies like Nexus get made
The process looks more like a film crew at work than a magic button.
For “Dino Demolition Squad,” Accetturo and Dan Weller wrote the script. Chris Capel directed the episode, created the images and animation, and edited it.
Capel built rough digital layouts of each scene in Autodesk Maya. He then used Seedance, the video model inside Dreamina, to generate shots from image and video references.
He worked on framing, staging and performance in separate passes, and he painted out flaws along the way.
The best part? In a reply on X, Accetturo said $5,000 to $7,000 went to animation. The rest covered everything else, and that is a reminder that good AI movies still need writers, directors and editors.
The companies behind Nexus
Two companies make the series possible.
Genre.ai is the AI production studio that Accetturo runs. It makes branded campaigns, short films and episodic stories.
Dreamina is an AI platform for creating and editing images and videos. It comes from ByteDance, the company behind the CapCut video editor, and its Seedance model generates the footage in Nexus.
Get ready for AI movies at feature length
Nexus shows where screen entertainment is heading.
If a team this small can make an episode this polished, feature-length AI films and full seasons of AI television are within reach.
Watch a few episodes below, and you will recognize the style when longer AI films arrive. For another look at how AI is changing what we play, read about AI rebuilding big-budget video games.
Watch: the Nexus series and the story behind it
Here are all seven Nexus episodes in release order, followed by the “Inside NEXUS” video.
Episode 1, “Wet Markets of Kafar,” opens in a fantasy market full of rare creatures.
Episode 2, “Pup Racing,” stages a high-stakes race in front of a packed fantasy arena.
Episode 3, “Last Blood of the Dragon Shrine,” follows a samurai on a quest for revenge through the snow.
Episode 4, “Squid Heist,” sends two bandits to rob a vault on a flying train six miles above the clouds.
Episode 5, “Monkey Death Games,” follows a contestant who wins over the crowd on a dangerous televised obstacle course.
The sixth release, “The Last Whales of Caldera,” follows a family that rescues sky whales from imperial poachers. Its YouTube title also says Episode 5.
Episode 7, “Dino Demolition Squad,” sends a backwoods dinosaur rider to win a war for the empire.
In “Inside NEXUS,” a short video from Dreamina, Accetturo explains the ideas behind the Nexus universe.
