Most AI-generated history content is garbage.
Wrong clothing. Invented scenes. Men who never met, standing side by side like old friends.
The National Dream is a three-act short film about the founding of Canada and, just as important, about connecting the country coast to coast, symbolized by the Canadian Pacific Railway.
It’s built to test what AI can actually do when someone tries to get it right, instead of just getting it done first.
To be clear: I’m not claiming 100% accuracy, and I’m not a professional filmmaker. This is a first project meant to prove the concept. What I’m striving for isn’t perfection — it’s the ability to tell the story clearly and get the big things right.
The Cabinet
Take the Confederation cabinet. Macdonald gets all the credit in most retellings, but George-Étienne Cartier ran the country alongside him. Historians widely consider the two men co-governors in practice, not just Prime Minister and junior partner. Alexander Galt, the first Minister of Finance, rounds out the cabinet in those early scenes.
Macdonald, Cartier, Galt. That’s the cabinet trio, and getting it right meant checking the record before a single frame was built.
Each man needed his own dedicated character reference, so he’d appear consistently, scene after scene. You can’t just write a prompt and hope the AI gets it right.
Building Macdonald
Macdonald himself looked different at every stage of his life, so each era got its own separate character reference: young Macdonald, the Confederation-era Macdonald, the aging Prime Minister.
It wasn’t enough to know what he did. Understanding how he spoke, how he moved, how he carried himself that’s the difference between a name in a textbook and a real person standing in front of you.
Iconic moments got the same treatment. The Last Spike at the Canadian Pacific Railway got its own dedicated reference image, built to match the moment as closely as possible.
The Research
None of this comes from guesswork. The character references for Macdonald and the rest of the cabinet were built using publicly available photos from sources such as Library and Archives Canada and Wikimedia Commons.
Macdonald’s age at each stage was cross-referenced with historical texts. Those speeches did double duty: they helped fill out the scripts and dialogue for the Confederation debate scenes, so the words on screen are grounded in what the man actually said.
One example: Macdonald’s 1891 speech, “A Question of Loyalty,” given near the end of his life when he was an old and veteran politician. That speech shaped how the aging Macdonald is written and portrayed in the later parts of the film.
The Tools
Sourcing photos and speeches is one thing. Making sense of them is another.
I used Google’s NotebookLM to help with that part. It’s a research tool built to take a pile of source material — speeches, archival texts, whatever you feed it and help you actually work with it, rather than just storing it in a folder you never open again.
For a project like this, that mattered. Confederation-era material is scattered. Speeches run long. Cross-referencing Macdonald’s age against a specific text, or tracking down which speech had the tone I needed for a given scene, isn’t a five-minute job when you’re doing it by hand.
NotebookLM didn’t write the script for me. What it did was help me organize the research so the ideas were actually usable — pulling threads out of long documents, keeping sources straight, and giving me a clearer path from “pile of history” to “scene I can build.” That’s the unglamorous part of a project like this, and it’s the part that determines whether the finished film feels grounded or feels like guesswork.
The Principle
The goal is accuracy, not perfection. Some choices in this series are dramatized — that’s what makes it a story and not a lecture. But the foundation is real research, real records, real people. No lazy shortcuts, no invented history dressed up as fact.
This isn’t another generic AI video. It’s history that informs, educates, and sparks curiosity Canada’s past, made real for a new generation.
The first full trailer for The National Dream is coming out soon. Keep an eye out.
