16 Days Per Episode: Kavan the Kid on Making The Chronicles of Bone

Months that feel like days.

Kavan's last visit was during Chapter Three. By this session Chapters Four and Five were out. Chris asked the question everyone asks: how is one person making 25-minute episodes this fast, when an agency asks for the same number of days to deliver a one-minute ad?

“Between 16 to 20 days to complete an episode. My months feel like days.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 1:31

His day starts between 5:00 and 5:30am with emails and any meetings, then production until about 11pm, then one hour to himself, then sleep, then repeat. The one new habit is a 45-minute walk at around 6pm, timed for the sunset. Doing something he loves, he says, is what fuels him through the hard days.

Better tools haven't made episodes faster so much as longer. Chapter Four ran just under 28 minutes, and he still had to cut two scenes. Without the cuts it would have run around 42 minutes and missed the deadline. The script for the whole series was written before production, so every cut means rebuilding the next episodes to make up for it.

Seedance 2.5 won't stop scoring.

Kavan had told Forbes that Seedance 2.5 cut comparable footage from about two weeks to about three days. It also brought a new problem. In Seedance 2, typing no music or natural sound only worked every time. In 2.5, a quiet conversation usually comes back clean, but a dramatic cut gets a boom, and any action shot comes back scored from start to finish.

“If you know how to get gens with no music whatsoever, let me know what that prompt is.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 7:10

He still calls 2.5 mind-blowing. It is the first jump where the AI look disappears, and the biggest change for him is synthetic actors who can give emotional performances. But the music has to go, and he has two ways to strip it.

Moises splits a clip into dialogue, effects and music in one pass. Sometimes it reads a sound effect as music and takes it too, so he rebuilds those from the effects library he has kept since his live-action days, plus Artlist. RipX DAW goes further, breaking audio into every individual frequency so you can click and delete the music out by hand. It took him an hour for one clip. Flawless, but only for a theatrical release.

“Sound is so beyond important. Definitely spend the time to build those sound effects so they're correct.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 16:03

Not if, but when.

Phantom X, the studio Kavan co-founded with Mike J Mitch and Sav on 1 January 2025, now has five shows. Mike's The Siege and Sav's Exile were both on episode seven, and Ace's Red Rainbow and Rafa's series were each on episode three. What he loves is how different each creator's vision is. Bigger announcements are coming, and he wants to bring all four of them on the show together.

Chris raised a wishlist item: native 5.1 surround sound, so AI films can play properly in cinemas. Kavan added true log footage, so colourists get the full colour data instead of a log look. Neither exists yet. Both, he says, are inevitable.

“With the advancement of us as humans, it's not a matter of if, it's just a matter of when.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 21:26

He recently rewatched something he made in early 2024, around Runway Gen 1, and the gap shocked him. He is proud of it anyway. Even if it looks like a potato now, it was part of the journey.

Every character should be a toy you'd buy.

One of the questions sent in before the session asked why Chronicles of Bone is so loved when there is so much hate for AI right now. Chris pointed out it has one of the best like-to-dislike ratios he has ever seen. Kavan gets a lot of comments that say some version of normally I hate AI, but I love this.

“Just because we have the tools and we can move so fast doesn't necessarily mean you should.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 24:18

“The word that I hate hearing is content. This stuff shouldn't technically be content. It's storytelling. It's art.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 24:52

His explanation comes in layers. The story first, with real stakes for characters people care about. Then character design: in a fantasy world, he says, every character, big or small, should look like an action figure you'd want to buy. Then sound and music.

That design process starts with real objects. Captain Nemo's mask was bought from a maker in Spain who signed a contract giving Kavan the rights, and was thrilled to see it in the show. The others are, in his words, the Temu versions.

Prove a human made it.

Chris asked where the copyright application had got to. Here is what is protected so far. The name The Chronicles of Bone is trademarked. The scripts and the world book are under copyright. Character designs that started as Kavan in a costume, then evolved through iterations, are registered too, because under current rules a copyrighted look has to begin with a human element.

The episodes themselves are the hard part. The Copyright Office's position, he says, is that if the shots were AI-generated, editing, music and grading don't change that. He is in the middle of proving otherwise, and thinks the rules will change, because it is still the wild west and the office is playing catch-up.

“My 16-hour work days will go to say otherwise.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 33:29

Chris's advice for anyone thinking about this: collect the evidence while you make the work, because you can't go back and fake it later. Kavan added that enterprise plans make some of this easier to obtain.

A canyon is harder than a battlefield.

Chapter Four's Battle of the Bay looked like the hard one: hundreds of Mordane knights against Nemo's army. Kavan says Chapter Five's fight was harder. The bay was two knight styles clashing while the camera followed a few leads. The Horns Canyon fight has a crowd of individual characters, including Lorsett Mordane, Tink, Robin Hood, the Last Lost Boy, Little John, Mordane knights, the Blood Guard and Robin's outlaws, all needing to stay themselves.

“Thank the Lord that there's 50 reps now in 2.5.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 36:49

Even with 50 references, generations kept mixing characters up, like Robin Hood suddenly wearing the Last Lost Boy's mask. And the location made it worse: a tight street between canyon walls gives the model no room to spread the action out. Dialogue scenes are now the easy part, needing far fewer generations to land a keeper.

What excites him most about 2.5 is subtlety. In the opening scene, when Gia Mordane knocks on the door, Orla Slade's face shows a flicker of nerves in her mouth that would have been impossible a version ago. Micro-expressions are an actor's real power, and synthetic actors are starting to have them.

“At some point or another, the synthetic actor is going to be able to do everything the same as an actor. It's just when.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 40:31

Who is the Shadow Knight?

▶ Watch The Chronicles of Bone, Chapter Five: The Reunion

The first ten minutes catch up with the Shadow Knight, last seen in Prologue Six when King Arthur slashed him across the chest with Excalibur. Vampires in this world heal from any wound except one made by Excalibur, which treats them like an ordinary person. That is why he needed Orla Slade's care.

Why does the queen ask if he is masked before entering? Because only two people in all the realms have seen the Shadow Knight's face: King Varek, and now Orla. Varek has warned her that if his identity ever gets out, he will know it was her.

The new knight, Gareth, is the younger brother of Gawain, the masked knight the Shadow Knight killed in Prologue Six. Arthur feels responsible, which is why Gareth's knighting as a Knight of Excalibur lands the way it does. Kavan's point: give every character their own history and motive, and the scenes write themselves.

Make up physics. Never break them.

Part two brings Tink face to face with Lorsett Mordane, the Prince of Torment, who enslaved her for ten years. Kavan explained the rules behind every move. Tink isn't super strong: she fights fast and nimble. Her burning attacks come from fairy dust, and she has to use it sparingly, because all the fairy dust is in Neverland. Like Excalibur, her magic leaves wounds vampires can't heal, which is why Lorsett still has the scars.

Her threat to leave him a stump with no eyes, no nose and no tongue, just ears to hear the screams, is a nod to Westley's to the pain speech in The Princess Bride, one of his all-time favourite films. For a vampire who only enjoys suffering, death would be no punishment.

“It's important to always establish the rules of the universe that you're creating, and then live within those rules.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 1:11:29

His example of what happens when you don't is Star Wars after Disney took over: spin-offs are fine as long as they live inside the rules fans know. He admits he now lives in his world more than the real one.

“I live more in the Chronicles of Bone world than I live in the real world at this point.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 1:11:54

And there is another world waiting. Untold, a story he started as a novel before AI, is like Star Wars meeting Game of Thrones and The Lord of the Rings, with knights in a sci-fi setting. His notes are one Google Doc of 600 or 700 pages in no particular order. It will need a full team and hour-long episodes.

The manager who didn't get it.

Chronicles of Bone launched on 4 November 2025 with a 90-second prologue. That length was deliberate: Instagram was his biggest audience then, and it pushes Reels of 90 seconds or less to new viewers. He showed it to Mike and Sav and told them it was the best thing he had made. Almost nobody else agreed.

“When I told my manager about it, he was like, I don't get it. And I was like, don't worry, I'll show you.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 1:15:13

Prologue Three, The Collector, was the first to pass a million views, and the deals followed. Before that, he had studio meetings where executives flicked through a lookbook of stills, built frame by frame in the Veo days before reference images, and compared it to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

The prologues, which he calls season zero, solved a YouTube problem. Launching a big ensemble show outside a streaming platform, jumping straight between characters would leave viewers asking who is this and why do I care. So each prologue stays with one character. By season one, everyone knows the players.

“If you feel it in your soul and it has that connective tissue, that will shine through. So just start doing it. Good storytelling will rise to the top. It always does. It always will.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 1:18:59

Tens of thousands, not ten million.

The final part springs a reverse trap. Jackal's blood magic lets him read memories, a rare power passed down only by birth and shared, so far, only by Vivian, the Lady of the Lake who created Excalibur, and the blind witch. It is why Tink doesn't trust him, and why who Jackal's real parents are is one of the show's big mysteries. Robin Hood's crew liberates cities from the Mordane Empire and hands them back. This time Jackal sees the ambush in someone's memory a moment too late.

After it, Kavan talked travel: he will be at Magnific's Upscale event in Spain on 4 November, and he spends every release day replying to comments. Then Chris got to the question people kept asking in chat: what does an episode actually cost?

Credits are expensive. A 27 or 28-minute episode comes to tens of thousands of dollars in video generations alone, before the image generations for every character change, prop, location and angle, and the music credits.

Just a filmmaker.

Jeremy asked the last question: does Kavan consider himself a filmmaker or an AI filmmaker?

“I just consider myself a filmmaker. At the end of the day we're telling stories. We're just using a tool that's available to us.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 1:44:53

“I never would have been able to make this story without it, because no studio would have taken a chance on it.”

Kavan the Kid▶ 1:45:59

Without AI, his route to a show this big would have been a breakout film, then another hit, then maybe a studio willing to gamble on a fantasy mash-up, or a bestselling book first. Studios want a built-in fanbase before they spend that kind of money, and even then shows start small. The first season of Game of Thrones is mostly talking, and budgets grow with success.

His last point was distribution. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia only became a hit around season five or six, he said, so making something great isn't enough. You have to build the buzz however you can. He promised to come back for the season finale in December.