Authors First Turned Genghis Storyboards Into Video Takes in Minutes With Higgsfield

The challenge

Authors First needed more performance options for Genghis: Birth of an Empire. Its artists had approved storyboards, but turning them into moving scenes a director could review was slow and expensive. The book-to-screen studio was adapting Conn Iggulden’s novel into a six-episode series with a 20-person production team. The season runs about 200 minutes.

Before Higgsfield, artists worked across separate generation tools, each with its own queue, workflow, and failure modes. Every additional take meant working through that fragmented process again. The studio needed to generate and review many takes per scene to find a strong performance, but the platforms it tried made that volume difficult to produce.

The bottleneck was the time between an approved board and a reviewable take. Authors First was built to adapt books that conventional production budgets could keep off screen, so repeated generation and review had to be practical.

The idea

Authors First wanted to build the generation process around the needs of an author-led adaptation. A storyboard established the intended scene; the team then needed performance options it could watch, compare, and judge. Faster iteration would give the people directing the series more opportunities to find a take that worked for the story.

The intended audience started with readers of the novels, followed by genre fans and viewers curious about the technology.

Higgsfield fit into that process after the creative team had established its direction. Authors and artists continued to lead the concept, scripting, character design, and boards. The platform supported the step where those decisions became moving frames. Creative judgment stayed with the team, and Iggulden retained the final cut on the adaptation.

How it was built

Production began with detailed preparation. Every episode started with a human-written screenplay and 500 to 600 hand-drawn storyboards before any image or video generation. That gave the artists a substantial set of planned scenes to work from, with the story and visual direction already developed by people.

Once a board was approved, artists used Higgsfield to turn it into video takes for director review. Seedance 2.5 on Higgsfield generated the performance takes from each approved board, and Nano Banana on Higgsfield handled the project’s image generation. Because artists worked in a single interface, producing another take no longer meant moving the work through a different tool.

Iggulden remained involved throughout production, reviewing the screenplay, casting, storyboarding, editing, and rough cuts. He met the production team in biweekly video meetings over several months.

Those reviews could turn on small visual details. Iggulden felt the young woman Bekter was to marry looked too physically fragile, which made Bekter seem more monstrous than intended. The production team reworked the young woman’s appearance. He also pushed for the low doors of Mongol tents, which force anyone entering to stoop.

The products

Authors First used Higgsfield for both video and image generation on Genghis: Birth of an Empire. Through the platform, artists used Seedance 2.5 to turn approved storyboards into performance takes, while Nano Banana handled the project’s image generation.

The result

At peak production on Genghis, Authors First generated thousands of video takes per two-week sprint through Higgsfield. The studio credits that volume with helping its 20-person production team deliver the six-episode series in months. The finished season of Genghis: Birth of an Empire runs about 200 minutes.