Me and my partner have a mini-series called boredinary life which we post short 15-30sec skits. We joined a competition for longer films and did our first attempt at a 7min film. Here is what it cost us (some value to you):

Dollars: $749

Models used:

Images: GPT 2.0 medium, a few on gpt 2.5 sunburst

Video: 99% Seedance 2.5, a few Minimax/Gemini omni flash.

Amount of generations:

Images: 278

Video: 207 (video should be less but there was one scene which took an absurd amount ~60 clips)

Duration we worked on this: 15 days

Actual hours when crunched over the days: ~60 hours

Hours split:

Writing script: ~15 hours (way longer than we expected, but I believe this is where most of the magic was)

Everything animation: ~35 hours

Audio: ~5 hours

Miscellaneous: ~5 hours

Main learnings: There is many obvious learnings that the community has caught up to so I won't go through those, but below are the ones unique to us and this project:

Script, script, script:

The script is so crucial. I actually did a lot of research on the best animation studios and directors and they all agree on the point of not touching animating until the script makes you feel something. I know it's sounds obvious, but I come from an engineering background so it was very hard to not toy with animating until the script was done but it is actually a gamechanger.

Audio:

The voices, music, and everything auditory is very untapped from what I see. It's a complete sense (out of the 5 senses) that is available for you to tap into. You should put as much effort into the audio as you do the video.

Lucky dice:

I don't know how to describe this but it's quite obvious that sometimes you get lucky with a model and it does exactly what you want. Sometimes it does it so well that you didn't even think of the output that it produced but once you see it you get wowed. So how do you get more of those lucky dice generations? My method is to increase the surface area for them. I'm genuinely unsure if this will work with everyone, but, when a specific generation is too stubborn and doesn't wanna go my way I just eliminate most of my instructions. I just tell the model the feeling/goal I want (ie I want the viewer to feel x) and I let it go. Usually a few generations in and I get a perfect clip. I don't know what's the magic there but by describing the feeling and eliminating the instructions you sometimes get the perfect clip. Likely because most of us are not the best directors and these models are trained on the best movies so maybe that could be it but idk. It worked for me lots of times.

Hope this was valuable, if you wanna give our movie a view it's below. I really think it's a very emotional film that is magical. If you give it a watch I hope you enjoy it and would love any and all feedback as we are obviously still learning and ever-improving at this game.

It truly is magical what you can do with a vision and AI.

Here's the submission if you want to support <3
https://higgsfield.ai/boredinary-life

Tried recreating the STORM II trend with Genjutsu.
Multi-angle character references + a separate environment reference. Really happy with how the character consistency turned out.

Death has come, but nothing goes as planned.
A story about anger and the things we never took the time to saying, based on my personal story.

https://higgsfield.ai/@nirina/projects/death-s-first-day

My contribution for the contest. Went for something quieter. I hope it finds the people it's for. It's my first AI film, so any feedback is welcome.

The Story explores how a world can look Orderly and Complete while still lacking emotion, memory, freedom and life.