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How were these AI short films dated? Four public clips, step by step

2026-11-08 · OpenStela

Each of the four short films below has a public page on the OpenStela registry, and each page carries three different dates: the day the maker says they made it, the moment the file was registered, and the moment its record was written to a public blockchain. Only the last two come from outside the maker's own word, and only the last one can be checked without trusting us.

This post walks through those four films: what they are, which tools their maker listed, when each date was set, and how you can download a file and confirm the record yourself. These are notes on how the films were dated, not reviews. We do not grade the work, and the registry does not either.

Which films, and why these four

On November 8, 2026, the market listed 53 public works. Twelve of them were videos. We picked four, from one account, for three reasons:

• They are short, finished clips with a character behind each one, so the binding between film and character is part of the story.
• They were made with two different tools, so you can see that the dating works the same regardless of how the film was generated.
• One of them went into an earlier nightly batch than the others, which shows how the timing actually plays out.

We left some public videos out. We skip anything whose character could read as a recognisable real person, we skip a child character, we avoid naming holders whose display name looks like a private person's real name, and one of the twelve is a recorded talk rather than a film. Public is what makes a work eligible; it is not a promise that we will feature it.

All four films below are held by an account displayed as Monolith Archive. Section 3 of our Terms says OpenStela may run accounts, including under pen names, that publish characters and works it creates itself, and that their records are made and anchored like anyone else's. We show display names exactly as the pages show them.

The four films

Each file is an MP4 of about ten seconds (we read the duration from the file header). Times are UTC.

A word on each, from what the pages show.

Gustave Plumeau is described on his character page as "a deadpan Parisian in a purple velvet suit who plays an invisible violin wherever he goes." The street dance is the only video among his works; the rest are stills of the air violin in a supermarket, a museum, the metro and a café. The film was registered 46 minutes after the character got his ID.

Dolores Vroom is "a brassy beehive diva in a hot-pink power suit who blow-dries her hair in the least suitable places." She has two films bound to her. We picked the dance, made with motion control, because her character record was already on chain before this film was registered. More on why that matters below.

Odile Blanchard, the woman with the cloud of white hair and the giant soap bubbles, appeared in an earlier post on character design. Here it is her crosswalk film, generated from a still with Kling 3.0.

Brick Matsuda is "a polite office worker built like a wall who handles every teacup with maximum effort." The film is the moving version of one of his stills, also registered on its own.

For the two Kling films, the maker's contribution reads: "Character design, scene direction and motion prompt, music prompt and edit, selection of the final take." For the two Genjutsu films: "Character design, choice of motion reference and location prompt, music selection and edit, final cut." When a work is marked as AI-generated, the registry requires that field, and it goes into the record that is anchored. It is the maker's own statement. Nobody at OpenStela checked it, and how much legal weight it carries is a separate question, covered in How much do I have to do for an AI work to be protected?

Three dates on every film page

Open any of the four pages and you will find these.

1. Claimed creation date. The day the registrant says the work was made. For all four, it is the same day as the registration. This is a statement, nothing more. For an image the registry also reads the date in the file's EXIF data as a second signal; for video it does not read container dates at all, so a film's claimed date has nothing beside it.
2. Registered. The moment the file arrived and its fingerprint was computed, to the microsecond. This is the platform's clock. It is better than a self-declared date, but if you only had this, you would be trusting us.
3. On chain. The registry bundles every new record into a daily batch at 19:20 UTC and writes the batch's root to Arbitrum One. Once that happens, the time is set by a public ledger we do not control, and the page links the transaction.

The gap between the second and third dates depends only on when you register. Gustave's film went in at 16:45 and was on chain two and a half hours later. The other three went in the next morning, UTC, and waited about 14 to 16 hours for the batch. Nothing about the tool or the length of the film changes that.

If you are entering a film somewhere and need the record to exist before a deadline, register at least a day ahead. What to keep before entering a Sora short in a festival covers the rest of the paper trail.

What the character binding adds

Each film is bound to its character, and the binding is a second record with its own fingerprint and its own place in the batch. The binding stores an automatic timing check: it compares the film's date with the date of the character's ID and records the result, along with what the comparison was based on. For all four films, the result is that the film came after the character, based on the date the holder claimed.

Here is where Dolores is different. Her character ID was issued on October 4 at 17:14 and went on chain in that night's batch. Her dance film was registered the next morning. So the order "character first, film second" is not just the platform's say-so: the character's record sits in an earlier on-chain batch than the film's. For the other three films, the character and the film were anchored in the same batch, a few hours apart on the platform clock.

Neither is wrong. It only changes which clock you are relying on to show the order. If that order matters to you, register the character, wait for the batch, then publish the films. Made a character with Higgsfield Genjutsu? Do this before it goes viral explains why that order matters for motion-control work in particular, and How to bind a Higgsfield video to a character shows the binding step.

Checking one yourself

You can check these records without an account and without trusting the registry. We did it for all four while writing this post.

1. Open the work page and download the film. The page shows a File fingerprint: the SHA-256 of the file.
2. Compute the SHA-256 of the file you downloaded (sha256sum on Linux, shasum -a 256 on a Mac). All four matched their pages.
3. Press Verify this record on the work page. It opens the verify page with the Record fingerprint, which is the fingerprint of the authorship record that contains the file fingerprint, the attribution, the dates and the contribution statement.
4. Read the three layers on the result. Registered and anchored are what the platform tells you. The chain check reads the transaction from the network, confirms it contains the batch root, and recomputes the path from the record to that root. All four records passed.

One practical note: paste the file fingerprint into the verify page and it finds the record too, but the on-chain proof runs on the record fingerprint, so use the verify button or the record fingerprint for the full check.

Five ways to prove a file existed on a date compares this with other timestamping methods, if you want to see where it sits.

What these records do not say

Every work page carries the same limits, and they apply to these films as much as to anything else. A record says this exact file existed from the registration date under the attribution shown. It does not say the registrant is the author. It does not say the film infringes nothing, or whether it resembles any other film. It is not a copyright registration. And re-encode a file, trim a frame or add a watermark, and the fingerprint changes: the record covers that one file, not every version of it. If you made ten takes and kept one, Which Kling version should I register? is worth a read.

Registering a film is free, up to the account's 300 MB of storage for uploaded works; a video file can be up to 95 MB. If you would rather not use storage, a link to a public post can be registered instead. It takes almost no space, but the record then covers the link (and a snapshot of the page, when the page can be read publicly), not the film file itself. All four films here were uploaded as files and are listed as showcase: not for sale, contact the holder if interested.

This is general information, not legal advice.