My book runs to a good 350 pages. We made the film to go with it, just the two of us.

People often ask me whether I write my books with AI. The short answer: no. The long answer is really no as well, but along the way it tells a story I find pretty wild.

I spent more than a year writing my novel. «LeoZeit: Schatten», a good 350 pages, fantasy, Leonberg in the year 1614, a thirteen-year-old girl caught between two worlds. I wrote every scene myself. Mostly at night, once Alicia — my real Alicia, not the one in the book — had finally fallen asleep. Sometimes over cold coffee, sometimes with the feeling that the plot had led me into a dead end and I would have to throw away three chapters.

That is how you write a book. No AI can help you there. An AI can put sentences together, sure. But it doesn’t know what Leonberg feels like in November, when the fog hangs so low that you can barely make out the castle. It doesn’t know why I chose Duchess Sibylla, of all people, as a character. It doesn’t know that feeling at three in the morning when you suddenly know how the chapter has to end — and you can’t stop typing.

Books need a human being. That won’t change any time soon.

But then came the film.

My first children’s book, «Sonja und die Mondfee», was finished. And Vitalii — my husband, an illustrator, an animation artist and the most patient person I know — said one day: “We could make a film out of it.”

There was a time I would have laughed. A film? The two of us? No studio, no budget, no team? That was an idea filed under “wouldn’t that be nice”.

Except that today it is no longer a fantasy. Using AI-assisted animation, we produced a short film. Vitalii conceived every scene, set the visual style, shaped the imagery. The AI was his tool — not his replacement. And the result was good enough to submit to the World AI Film Festival in Cannes (waiff.com).

Cannes. Us. From Leonberg.

Sometimes I still have to let that sink in.

And that is what I really want to write about: not technology, not algorithms, but what this means for authors. For all authors.

Every writer I know has, at some point, dreamt of seeing their story turned into a film. Their own characters suddenly walking and talking and breathing. Until now that was a dream that depended on other people — on publishers, producers, people with money and connections. You could spend years writing and hoping and waiting.

That is changing right now. Not in theory. Not “in the future”. Now. An author with a good story and the right partner can make their own film. No permission needed. No waiting for the call that never comes.

You still have to tell the story yourself. You still have to put the soul into it yourself. But the door that used to be locked? It’s standing open.

We’re walking through it.

Anna-Mariia Kostiuk lives and writes in Leonberg. «LeoZeit: Schatten» is out in hardcover. She produced the AI-animated short film of «Sonja und die Mondfee» together with Vitalii Kostiuk.