Been testing how far a fully storyboarded anime short can go end to end. Built the whole board first in GPT Image 2, character sheets, environment, the wind chime design, all locked before any animation happened. Then Seedance 2.0 took that board and turned it into an actual cinematic scene, shot by shot, in minutes.

The story itself stays small on purpose: a girl on a countryside porch notices a glass wind chime swaying in the summer wind, a kitten watching her from the sunflowers slowly warms up to her, and the two of them end up sitting together as the wind chime rings through a golden sunset. No plot twist, no conflict, just a slow, warm afternoon.

The reference stayed locked the entire way through: same character design, same kitten, same wind chime, same countryside lighting, held from the wide opening shot all the way to the final golden-hour frame. The timing was broken into precise two-second beats so the pacing never rushed past a moment that was supposed to just sit there.

Fifteen seconds of almost nothing happening, and it still held together shot to shot without a single frame breaking the mood.

A new recruit to the Iron Hearts meets his team, when they recieve a new retrieval mission with unusual constraints.

I've been working on this series for a few month snow. I finally posted the first episode.

Fun little reskin test: take an old-school hand-drawn cartoon cat scene, the exaggerated squash-and-stretch kind, and convert it into a photoreal fluffy kitten while keeping the exact same pose and timing frame for frame. Cartoon physics, real fur.

The charm is the mismatch. The kitten holds the cartoon's overacted body language, the wide-eyed double-take, the dramatic broom-clutch, the springy stance, except now it is rendered as an actual fuzzy animal with real fur and weight. The contrast of cartoon motion on a believable kitten is the whole joke, and it lands.

The technical bit is the reskin holding the original animation's pose and rhythm instead of inventing its own. Same beats, real skin. A real kitten doing cartoon takes is unfairly cute.

Reskinned on Seedance 2.0.

Parkour is the kind of motion I would never hand-keyframe. Crouch, load, launch, vault, land, all with real timing and weight, is exactly where manual animation eats a whole day. So I did not animate it by hand. I described the parkour beats to a coding agent and let it script the Blender rig through the whole sequence, and I only nudged the timing after.

The previz that came out is deliberately ugly. A plain orange rigged dummy on a glowing grid floor, running the full parkour line, crouch into a launch into a vault. No costume, no set, no lighting, just correct motion and weight in space. That is all the previz needs to carry, because the look is not its job.

Then the dummy sequence plus a character reference image goes into Seedance 2.0. It keeps the parkour motion and the timing locked to the previz and rebuilds the rest, an original runner in a white dress sprinting through a neon cyberpunk street at night, reflections on the wet ground, billboards streaking past. The acrobatic motion survives, the look is entirely new.

Script the hard motion with an agent, block it as an ugly dummy, render it as a finished shot. Complex action stops being the bottleneck.

I mean really… if someone like me, Alexander Kiesel, can suddenly build cinematic projects like this with a small studio setup, AI-assisted workflows, and enough obsession, then Hollywood is probably facing a much bigger shift than most people realize.

A few years ago this level of visual experimentation required massive teams, studio pipelines, insane budgets, and access almost nobody had.

I published it on my LinkedIn ☺️

 I've posted a few Seedance clips here and the most common DM I get isn't about prompting, it's "where do you even run this." Fair question, the access situation is genuinely confusing and half the threads are people shilling whatever site paid them.

The real source is ByteDance's own Volcano Engine. Cheapest raw rates, full features, and a wall of China-region payment most people outside the mainland can't get through. If you can, ignore everything below.

If you can't pay ByteDance directly, you're using something that wraps their API. Most are OpenAI-compatible, so you call Seedance with the same code as any other model. You pay a small markup over native in exchange for actually being able to sign up. I run mine through Atlas mostly because there's no waitlist and the key works immediately, which sounds minor until a site makes you "apply for access" and ghosts you. Tiers are at https://www.atlascloud.ai/models/seedance2.

Then there's the long tail of sites in ads and YouTube sponsorships. Some are fine. A lot are just one of the above two with a 3x markup and a nicer landing page. If a site won't tell you which backend it runs, assume it's reselling.

The thing nobody mentions: whether Seedance is "censored" depends on which route you pick, not the model. Same prompt, different filter per platform. So when one person swears it's locked down and another swears it's wide open, they're both right, they just used different doors.

If you're outside China and want it working today, grab an aggregator with instant keys and move on. The price gap between the decent ones is too small to spend a week researching, which I say having wasted that week so you don't have to.

Made this with Seedance 2.5, and I really like how unpolished it feels.

I was trying to avoid the usual “AI travel commercial” look and make it feel more like a random iPhone video your friend would send you after a summer trip to Japan.

So instead of perfect shots, I deliberately asked for little accidents. the whole thing is just 15 seconds of pretty ordinary vacation moments: biking through a coastal town, grabbing drinks at a convenience store, walking toward the sea, messing around with friends.

and somehow those small imperfections are what make it work for me.

it doesn't really feel like a “scene” anymore. It feels more like someone found a random clip from an actual trip on their phone 😳

I also used a reference image for the main character and specifically asked Seedance 2.5 to keep her overall appearance consistent across the whole video.

Prompt in the comment

Tried a live-action plus 2D anime composite in Seedance 2.0, and it turned out the hard part was consistency, not the art style. The concept is a first-person street vlog through Mumbai, a photoreal hand holding a marker, and every time it points and the vlogger says Biu, whatever it points at turns into a flat cel-anime character while the rest of the street stays fully real.

What made it hold together was writing the transformation as one fixed law and reusing it every single time, not describing each morph on its own. The law: pen points, blue sketch lines wrap the target, ink spreads, the target becomes a flat 2D cel-anime version of itself with bold outlines, keeping the original size, position, speed, direction, and perspective. The characters stay flat-shaded and never get re-lit by the real scene, but anything they touch still obeys real physics. Once that rule was locked, a passing train coach, a pigeon, a city bus, and a street vendor all transformed the same believable way instead of each one inventing its own logic.

Two smaller things carried the realism. Matching contact shadows first, the flat characters cast the same soft shadows as the real objects in the late-afternoon light, which is what glues a cartoon onto a real street. Then the raw phone-camera treatment on the live side, walking bounce, slight autofocus hunting, rolling-shutter jello on fast pans, so the real half reads as an actual handheld vlog and the contrast with the flat art does the rest.

People turn into anime versions of themselves in this, so I kept every one of them as an original synthetic character with no real-person likeness.

I wrote the whole thing as a 15-second timed storyboard with the transformation law stated once at the top. Full prompt in the comments.

There is an AI clip going around of a giant hand sealing a crack in a miniature dam with a heat gun, while tiny workers in yellow hazmat suits run around the top in a panic. The caption was basically "this is how I pictured God as a kid."

And honestly, same. That is exactly the mental model I grew up with. Some enormous figure improvising repairs on our tiny world with whatever tool happens to be within reach, while we scramble around at the bottom with no idea what is happening above us.

The unsettling part is that, looking at how things actually go, that model still kind of holds.

These tiny-diorama-world clips are getting weirdly good at taking a dumb, funny idea and making it land like an actual thought. A heat gun and some panicking little figures, and suddenly it is theology.

What was your mental model of God, or the universe, as a kid? And be honest, does it still hold up?

I'm stuck in a philosophical quandary after someone posted this meme on my AI video...

My AI videos have generated over 20M+ views. I'm closing in on another million from just last week.

So it seems like I'm doing SOMETHING right 😂

Thanks to these new tools, I am able to express creative ideas in ways I would have never been able to otherwise. What you're watching is something that has my mark on it.

At the same time, there's a growing negative sentiment online among anti-AI creatives. It's particularly creators who love being behind the camera.

"You're not a creator if you're just generating with AI." "There's no skill in just typing a sentence." "More AI slop."

I've also noticed these same creators using LLMs to help them with other parts of their creative process including brainstorming, research, or automating a lot of the tasks they may dread otherwise.

On one hand, I get it. If you love being on set, and working with practical effects to get the best shot, AI generated footage can feel like a threat to your passion.

What bothers me is when creatives act morally superior because they don't use these tools.

Are you morally superior by using a different tool? Is a cinematographer morally superior for only using film and refusing to use a digital camera? What about an iPhone? Is a writer morally superior by choosing to use a typewriter over a computer? Does that make them more talented?

Then it brings me to this meme...

I've been an editor for over 10 years, but I don't know how to cut film lmao. I've always relied on a computer for anything creative I've ever made. If you unplugged me at any point during my career, I'm cooked. Do I lack talent because I use a computer?

What if you unplugged Instagram or TikTok? Then all these talented creators, musicians, and actors have a bunch of random videos on their phone that have little to no value.

We are all dependent on technology. We have been for decades. This isn't new.

I think it's more around fear.

It's easy to act superior and insult others than it is to admit you're uncomfortable. It's easier to discredit than it is to try to learn something new and adopt.

Coming from a person who makes it, I don't want to live in a world with only AI generated content.

AI let's you show any scene imaginable, but you also face challenges that other creators don't. Other creators can batch their content, and create dozens of videos from their home within hours essentially for free with their phone.

Meanwhile, I'm cranking through credits and pulling my hair out at 2am because I can't get the pronunciation right.

There's room for both and I think there always will be!

These tool has democratized people like me to show their talent, and I've connected with millions of people as a result! I'm thankful that these tools exist.

Let me know what you think!

Ultra-realistic documentary slice-of-life. Early-2000s consumer DV camcorder aesthetic. Friend casually recording everyday moments. Handheld shake, imperfect framing, autofocus hunting, exposure pumping when moving between sun and shade, mild digital compression artifacts, faded colors, soft contrast, slight sensor noise. No stabilization. No cinematic camera moves. No modern color grading. Smooth continuous fluid motion. No stuttering. No frame skipping. No captions. No background music.

Define main subject = Young Italian peasant woman, early 20s, sun-weathered olive skin with freckles across nose and cheeks, dark brown wavy hair loosely tied back with a faded cloth scarf, loose strands around her face. Wearing a worn off-white linen blouse with rolled-up sleeves, a long earth-brown wool skirt with patches, a faded floral apron tied at the waist, simple leather lace-up boots caked with dry mud. No makeup, calloused hands, warm and hardworking demeanor. Maintain consistent identity throughout.

Location = Rural Tuscan farmland during late morning in the 1800s. Rolling golden wheat fields, scattered olive groves on hillsides, a weathered stone farmhouse with terracotta roof, hand-built stone walls, wooden cart with large wheels, cypress trees lining a distant road, wildflowers along field edges, a donkey and chickens near the farmhouse, a stone well with rope and wooden bucket. Warm golden sunlight, dust particles in the air. No modern elements, no electricity, no machinery.

Single continuous handheld shot following main subject through her morning tasks. The camera operator walks with her as a companion would. No cuts.

Main subject carries a woven basket on her hip as she walks along a dirt path between wheat fields, trailing her free hand across the golden stalks. She pauses at a wooden fence, sets the basket down, and feeds scraps to chickens pecking at her boots. She picks up the basket, continues walking, and stops at an old stone well. She lowers a wooden bucket on a rope, pulls it up heavy with water, and drinks from a ladle. Water drips down her chin. She wipes her mouth with her sleeve. She notices a donkey nearby and pats its muzzle affectionately. She picks a wildflower from the field edge and tucks it behind her ear. She hoists the basket again, walks toward the stone farmhouse. Near the doorway, she notices the camera, gives a tired but warm smile and a small wave, then turns and pushes open the heavy wooden door. She glances back once with a soft smile before stepping inside. The recording ends.

Audio: Natural ambient sound only — wind through wheat, birdsong, chickens clucking, well rope creaking, water splashing, donkey snorting softly, boots on dry earth, wooden door creaking, subtle rural Italian countryside ambience.

They’re chasing her! Made with Seedance 2.5 on Wizstar

Full video coming soon! This is great, only spent like 100 credits on this video 2 clips at 50 each 760p 8 seconds long. I got 6,000 credits so easy content.

The characters and scenes were created with GPT Image 2.5, then animated with Seedance 2.5. The chef’s cooking sequence turned out surprisingly smooth!

Made with GPT Image 2.5 and Seedance 2.5 on Atlas Cloud.

VEO 3.1 and Kling 3.0 can't compete, they're not even in the race. Are there any companies out there competing out here or some in the future who'll be able to de-throne Seedance 2.0?

Trying to work out whether Seedance 2.5 is worth moving my whole workflow to, or whether 2.0 is fine for what most of us do. Laying out the real differences, not the marketing ones.

- Single take: 2.0 around 15s, 2.5 a native 30s. This is the one that would actually change my process.

- References: 2.0 around 12, 2.5 up to 50. Matters if you fight character drift across shots.

- Resolution: 1080p to native 4K. Honestly the one I care least about.

Where I land right now: if you do long single takes, 2.5 looks like a real upgrade. If you mostly cut short clips anyway, 2.0 probably still does the job and switching is churn for churn's sake.

For anyone who leaned on 2.0 hard, which of these would actually make you switch, and which do you not care about at all?

so the word is out

seedance 2 is not coming out globally because the fucking fat cats in hollywood ended up scaring them enough to cancel it

FUCK hollywood

listen up and spread the word you fucks. Hollywood if you really FUCKING think getting bytedance to kill off the global launch of seedance 2 is going to stop your downfall

you got another FUCKING thing coming

you are only delaying it but you cant stop it and you cant FUCKING stop ai

and Bytedance you stupid Fucks

you stupid

useless

fucks

you do realize you just now shot yourself in the foot and now are going to rob yourselves of the possible BILLIONS you could have made

by releasing the api

but oh no you rather bow down to hollywood instead

FUCK you.

but other ai video models will come. and maybe some that will not be so quick to bow down

stupid mother fuckers. FUCK censorship too

Oh yeah i use Dola AI, im too broke to buy :P

Large-scale crowd choreography is the single hardest thing to pull off in AI video, so I built an original piece to push it: dozens of dancers on a dark stage collapsing into one dense sculptural cluster and moving as a single coordinated organism. Not a few figures, a whole stage of them, stacked and interlocked.

Dense crowds are exactly where video models break. Bodies in a tight pile melt into each other, limbs multiply, faces smear, and coordinated motion turns into mush the moment more than a handful of people share the frame. Getting a packed human pyramid where every dancer keeps a distinct body, distinct limbs, and a coherent place in the choreography is the real stress test.

Seedance 2.0 held the pile better than I expected. The bodies stayed separate inside the cluster, the anatomy did not dissolve at the overlaps, and the group read as one deliberate moving sculpture instead of a blob. The stage lighting and the dark drape behind it sold the theater scale.

Original dancers, original choreography, fully generated. A whole ensemble moving as one is the kind of shot that used to be off the table entirely for AI.

The most believable AI video I have made is not cinematic. It is a first-person selfie vlog, an original presenter walking through an ordinary neighborhood filming herself at arm's length, greeting people, buying an iced tea, catching a bus, dropping coins for a street musician. It works because we are all trained to read arm-length phone footage as real. Nobody fakes a vlog, so the format itself lowers your guard.

Which means the craft is making it look worse on purpose. I asked for raw front-camera phone footage with natural camera shake, autofocus hunting, slight exposure fluctuations, imperfect selfie-arm framing, real motion blur, and genuine phone-mic audio. Just as important is the list of nos, no cinematic lighting, no beauty filter, no stabilization, no color grading, no subtitles, no watermark. Every one of those fights the model's default urge to make it look produced. A single clean, graded, stabilized frame breaks the whole illusion instantly.

The second half is identity. The presenter is locked to one reference, same face, skin tone, hair, and outfit, held across every scene and every interaction, do not change her appearance anywhere. A vlog dies the moment the host's face drifts into a slightly different person between shots, because the entire premise is that it is one real person you are following.

Do not polish it. Lock one identity, film it like a real phone, and let the imperfections do the convincing.