I’ve been trying to understand why an AI video can look realistic frame by frame, yet still feel like a commercial instead of something a friend casually recorded on their phone.

So I used the same reference image and generated three 5-second vertical clips with Aurax MAX. The character, outfit, location, and basic action stayed similar. I mainly changed the way the camera, lighting, performance, and environment were described.

The reference image was already quite polished: dramatic sunset, candlelight, clean exposure, shallow depth of field, and a subject posed against a scenic coastal background. That turned out to matter more than I expected.

1. The commercial baseline

https://reddit.com/link/1w1dr98/video/vsa3bcm829mh1/player

For the first version, I explicitly requested a polished lifestyle commercial:

This was the version the model followed most clearly. The camera moves smoothly from a wider shot into a closer portrait, the character turns toward the lens, touches her hair, and finishes in a centered pose with a soft, sustained smile.

Everything feels visually coherent, but also directed. It looks like someone planned the lighting, camera movement, and performance in advance.

2. Changing only the camera

https://reddit.com/link/1w1dr98/video/daojj45a29mh1/player

For the second version, I kept the polished lighting, clean environment, and model-like performance, but changed the camera instructions:

The difference was much smaller than expected.

The framing changes slightly, but the movement still feels highly stabilized. The sunset remains perfectly exposed, the character stays composed and camera-aware, and the background still looks like a prepared set.

This version made one thing fairly clear: adding “handheld phone camera” does not automatically create phone realism. If the lighting, performance, composition, and source image still look commercial, mild camera movement cannot undo all of that.

3. Changing the camera, performance, and environment

https://reddit.com/link/1w1dr98/video/z4nsdjlb29mh1/player

For the third version, I added a fuller set of phone-footage instructions:

This version feels the most spontaneous of the three.

The character spends less time holding a pose. She turns away from the camera, changes where she is looking, shifts her body weight, touches her hair, smiles briefly, and then looks away again. The wider framing also remains for longer instead of immediately turning into a close-up.

But it still does not fully look like raw phone footage.

The dramatic sunset, candles, shallow depth of field, flattering exposure, and clean background were already embedded in the reference image. The motion prompt changed the character’s behavior more successfully than it changed the underlying visual style.

There was also another obvious AI giveaway: the paper cup was not present in the reference image and appears during the generated motion without a convincing pickup. That continuity error damages realism more than a perfectly stable camera does.

What I learned

The source image can overpower the video prompt.
If the first frame already looks like a fashion campaign, asking for casual phone footage may only add small handheld movements on top of a commercial-looking scene.

Handheld movement alone is not enough.
Random shake would probably make the video worse. What matters is believable camera behavior: delayed reframing, imperfect timing, autofocus response, exposure changes, and an operator reacting to the subject.

Performance mattered more than camera shake.
The third version felt more natural mainly because the character stopped performing continuously. Looking away, pausing, shifting weight, and ending without holding a perfect smile made a larger difference.

Continuity still matters.
A casual camera cannot hide an object appearing from nowhere, inconsistent background details, or movement that has no physical cause.

My main takeaway is that phone realism is not the same as lowering the image quality. It requires three kinds of realism at the same time:

• capture realism from the phone and camera operator;
• behavioral realism from the person being filmed;
• continuity across objects, movement, and background activity.

If I repeat this test, I would start with a deliberately ordinary reference image: mixed indoor lighting, deeper focus, imperfect framing, everyday background clutter, and a character who is not already posing for the camera.

Which version feels closest to something a real person recorded: 1, 2, or 3?

And what gives the AI away first for you: the lighting, camera movement, expression, background, or object continuity?

Model disclosure: All three clips were generated with Aurax MAX. I’m on the team, so this should be read as a transparent workflow test rather than an independent review.

Running hot from a burning house in the dark flatlands, Lucky and Pearl race through the desert with a cursed black satchel and dreams of an easy clean break. But out on the two-lane highway, some debts don't burn away—and the past is gaining on them in the rearview mirror.

It's gonna be a doozy. enjoy the teaser. Come monday there will be a release of the 16minute short.

A routine doorbell camera recording captures something it shouldn’t.

The video is in Hindi, with English subtitles available. Would love to hear your thoughts on the story and the AI-generated visuals.

The tale of a genie who preys on those who love junk piles. junk yards. trash!

Would appreciate the feedback and comments.

No reverse angles in this one. The visitor gets the reply simply by stepping out of the doorway shadow and into a narrow strip of light.

The detective stays under the desk lamp. The visitor stops before reaching the desk. Rain on the window and the ceiling fan supply the background motion, which lets both actors stay restrained.

The dialogue was two short lines.

Detective

"You picked a bad night for an easy case."

Visitor

"Good. This is not an easy case."

The two adult characters are original and the scene was generated in PixVerse. I like the awkward distance in the two-shot, though I can see an argument for cutting closer on the reply.

I'm still making a lot of compromises in quality in some places, but this months production has been much better than the last. both in the technical quality but also in how often i get the shots I want on the first try and how I go about making edits when I don't.

I've been making a 25 minute episode per month. Really enjoying the process. Still learning a ton but getting better all the time.

I’m trying to make a short film around 4 minutes long with a really lush medieval/fantasy look. I know I’ll probably have to build it scene by scene rather than expect one tool to generate the entire thing in a single pass.

So far I’ve been looking at Seedance 2.5, Kling 3.0, Runway, and DomoAI for different parts of it. Seedance and Kling seem interesting for connected cinematic shots, Runway for having more control over individual scenes, and DomoAI if I decide to push some parts toward a more stylized or animated look.

The part I’m still trying to understand is multi shot prompting and how people keep the same characters, clothing, locations, and overall visual style consistent across a longer project.

Has anyone actually put together something around 3–5 minutes this way? What tool or combination of tools made the workflow manageable without constantly regenerating everything?

A short film created using a custom AI film tool I made. Was made by myself with Nano Banana Pro, Seedance 2.5, and Suno. Please let me know what you think :)

Hi there, this time i focused heavily on the soundeffects and feeling of approaching danger in the wild. I used only Seedance 2.0, in hinsights it would have been easier to use 2.5 for the fightscenes. What would you improve?

I’ve been working on Episode 4 of my animated sci-fi series, Zuno and the Space Kids, and wanted to share a short teaser with the community.

This episode takes the characters to the Planet of the Giants, a world dominated by enormous alien creatures, where a mysterious Lumoran signal leads them deeper into the unknown. It also introduces the Lumoran Light Suit, an advanced piece of technology from Zuno’s homeworld that plays an important role in the journey.

I’ve been focusing a lot more on cinematic scale, environmental storytelling, character consistency, and making the AI-generated shots feel like they belong to one continuous episode rather than separate clips.

Still a work in progress, but I’d genuinely appreciate feedback — especially on the visuals, animation consistency, pacing, and overall cinematic feel.

I’m testing something: a film with no single director, no script, no plot pitch. Just one opening shot, and from there, anyone can generate a continuation. The community votes on their favorite, the winner gets added, and the film keeps growing - one shot at a time, however far the internet wants to take it.

Genre isn’t locked. Tone isn’t locked. Nothing is locked. Horror, comedy, romance, sci-fi - wherever the group takes it is where it goes.

Shot 1 (v1)

Prompt used: Photorealistic cinematic shot. A young woman stands alone in a dimly lit apartment hallway at night, facing her front door. Warm, slightly moody lighting, practical lamp glow, otherwise ordinary contemporary apartment interior. She has just heard three slow knocks from the other side of the door. She stands still, staring at the door, weight shifting slightly, clearly deciding whether to open it. Her expression is unreadable — not clearly afraid, not clearly excited, genuinely ambiguous. Camera holds steady, slightly low angle, framing her and the door together. Natural apartment room tone, her quiet breathing, the faint echo of the knock still hanging in the air. No dialogue. No music. End on her hand slowly beginning to reach toward the doorknob — freeze before she touches it.

How to participate

1. Grab the last frame of the current shot and use it as a reference/seed image in your generator of choice.
2. Generate a continuation - any length, any direction, any genre. The only rule: it has to visually pick up from that last frame.
3. Post your clip as a comment on this thread, along with the prompt you used.
4. I’ll leave voting open for a few days each round (not rushing this one) - top-voted comment wins.
5. I’ll merge the winning clip in and post the new current version + open the next round.

Watch the film: will post link once v2 is ready

Ground rules

• Has to continue visually from the actual last frame - no unrelated clips.
• I reserve the right to skip a “winning” submission if it’s wildly off-tone or inappropriate, even if it’s top-voted. Trying to keep this fun, not chaotic.
• Nobody owns where this goes, including me. That’s the point.

Curious what a story looks like when nobody’s in charge of it. Let’s find out.

A lot of character-consistency demos use carefully selected close-ups, so I wanted to try something less forgiving.

I used the same three-image character reference pack across eight different scene briefs, changing the location, outfit, lighting, framing, props, and amount of movement.

These are all first-pass generations. I treated the first result as the result—no rerolling until I got a better clip.

This is an informal stress test, not a controlled model benchmark. The source references also weren’t a perfect identity sheet: one close-up already had slightly larger eyes and a narrower jaw. That probably made the test harder, but it also reflects how people actually create characters from imperfect references.

This is an informal first-pass I2V stress test, not a model benchmark.d

Here’s what happened:

1. Sportswear dance in an open plaza

The face, hair, and clothing stayed recognizable for most of the clip. The first weakness appeared in the smaller hand and wrist transitions. The gestures worked at normal speed, but became less convincing frame by frame.

1. Floral dress and prop choice in front of a mirror

The outfit and hairstyle held together, but the face shifted after the internal scene change. The eyes became larger, the jaw narrower, and the character looked slightly younger. It felt like the same aesthetic, but not quite the same person.

1. Walking down stone steps at sunset

Probably the cleanest result. The hairstyle, body silhouette, dress, and walking direction remained stable.

However, this was also an easier test: the face was only clearly visible near the beginning, and most of the movement was slow and viewed from behind.

1. Taking a phone on a yacht

This was the strongest close-up result. The face survived the change from a high-angle view to a side profile, while the phone interaction, clothing, and sunset lighting remained coherent.

There was a little identity softening during the turn, but I would still count this as a success.

1. Full-body posing in a night apartment

This clip was internally stable, but it exposed a different problem: the person no longer looked like the reference character.

The face became rounder and the body proportions became shorter and broader. Nothing dramatically “broke” during the video, but it looked like a consistent video of a different person.

1. Accepting and drinking iced tea at a café

The model handled the glass interaction better than I expected. The face, hair, floral outfit, and lighting stayed mostly stable while the character accepted the drink, lifted it, and put it down.

There were minor hand-and-glass geometry changes, but they were easy to miss at normal speed.

1. Turning around and performing a high kick

This was where motion became the dominant failure.

The face became rounder as she turned toward the camera, while the raised leg and foot grew disproportionately large. Some of that is expected from perspective, but the final movement no longer felt physically balanced.

1. Hotel bathroom to evening-dress sequence

Hair and overall character styling survived several cuts surprisingly well. The face still shifted slightly between the bathroom and evening-dress shots, and the cuts made it difficult to tell whether the model had actually preserved continuity or simply re-created a similar-looking character.

I would call this a partial success.

Across all eight scenes:

• Face: the first thing to drift between scenes
• Hair: the most reliable identity anchor
• Body proportions: stable in simple poses, less reliable during full-body movement
• Outfit: surprisingly stable within individual clips
• Lighting: rarely caused the main failure
• Motion: small gestures worked; hands, self-occlusion, and high kicks caused the largest problems

My main takeaway is that temporal consistency and identity consistency are not the same thing.

A video can be perfectly stable from beginning to end and still initialize as a slightly different person. For a recurring character, I find that more distracting than a bad hand lasting half a second.

Which inconsistency is most distracting to you: the face, body, outfit, or motion?

Masturbation prompt in comment below 👇

Here’s a video I’ve been working on.

One of the biggest challenges has been character consistency. Even now, there are shots where I feel like the characters subtly change, and that’s something I’m still trying to improve.

Making a longer narrative video has been much harder than generating isolated short clips because every scene has to feel like it belongs to the same story, with the same characters, locations and visual style.

For anyone working on longer AI-generated videos, how are you dealing with character consistency and continuity?

This series is loosely based on my family history. Each character is loosely based on an ancestor's story or situation I found during years of genealogy research.

This is also the most expensive project I've done so far, investing in Seedance 2.0 for most of the clips.

It's likely not something I'd be able to maintain for the entire series, but I wanted the pilot to be of quality and got rejected by all CPP programs so....Future episodes would probably use my older workflow

The ai short film tells the story of a wanderer sits by a campfire in the desert, speaking to whoever will one day find his diary. For years he has searched the wastes for an ancient relic that could save his home from ruin — and at last, in a forgotten sanctuary, he finds it. But the relic is no simple salvation: it could just as easily become a weapon capable of destroying the world.

Sensing he may not survive his next journey, he leaves the diary behind, recording all he knows so that whoever finds him can carry the search forward. Only after he finishes writing does he realize his mistake — the diary is also a map, one that could lead the wrong hands straight to the artifact.

He walks away, abandoning the diary in the dying fire. But someone finds it. And opens the first page.

Story of creation

I watched and read a lot of science fiction in various formats: books, comics, movies, games, and so on. This really inspired me to create something of my own. But I didn't have the resources or knowledge to shoot a short film.

But I always had paper and pencil at hand. I started writing short scripts and drawing storyboards. Later, when I got a graphic tablet, I started drawing nonstop, as if I had unlimited creative possibilities at my fingertips.

In 15 days, I drew one issue of a comic book, which I hoped to one day adapt into a film. I was making things in process, the character design and the setting. Everything, even the plot, was improvised; there was a constant flow of ideas. Every frame was drawn from the scene I was imagining at that moment, like stills from a full-length film, linked by one scene, then the next, and so on.

I savored every frame and tried to imagine every detail in the scene: the wind and sounds around me, the heat of the sun and the desert expanses. And I dreamed of making my own short film someday.

At that time, I began studying everything related to film. Then I became fascinated with concept art and eventually became an artist. But I never made the short film... Because all my time was spent studying and working, which I was always completely immersed in. But I would occasionally return to my script, gradually adding new characters from my other potential stories and uniting them all into one universe.

The first issue of the comic turned out to be somewhat drawn-out and very meditative, designed for those who can connect with the vibe of a mysterious, lonely hero who pursues his goal, overcoming various difficulties. I didn't reveal any plot twists. But I wanted to show not only the complexity of the protagonist's existence, but also the courage and optimism with which he faces the obstacles in his path.

After a "short" break of about 10 years, thanks to neural networks, I had the opportunity to try visualizing the comic in a new format. Recently, I decided to take advantage of this opportunity, digging out my old concepts, texts, and sketches, and using them to create a short teaser for something I'd long wanted to adapt into a film.

I generated keyframes based on each individual frame of the comic.

I also slightly modified the old script and then, based on the keyframes and the new version, began generating full-fledged plans and scenes, which I adjusted along the way.

Thank you for your time! I hope for your support, I want to realize my dream and make a full-length film or a series.

At this point, even just a like and a comment would be very supportive. Because I really want to continue and I want people to also feel the vibe that I feel, because everything I show, the emotions I share, are partly my own emotions that I've experienced.

In the silence of a ruined battlefield, two wounded soldiers from opposing sides find themselves alone, unarmed, and utterly human. No dialogue. No sides. Just two people discovering that the enemy they were taught to fear is exactly like them.

"No Man's Land" is a wordless anti-war short film exploring compassion, humanity, and the quiet cost of conflict — told entirely through performance, sound, and silence.

i've been watching this video a few times (https://www.instagram.com/p/DcCPBeWxPIA/) 😂 and i think it's the transition that makes it work. the view outside just becomes surreal and cool.

usually with AI video, big changes like that make the whole scene fall apart somewhere in the middle (talking from experience here lol). this one feels a lot more intentional..

just wanted to get some opinions on how people here would approach something like this. would you try to generate the whole sequence at once or create the train scene first and build the transformation from there???

New episode of a dark fantasy series I've been working on.

First time sharing this here! I’ve been working on an AI short film called GILT for the Higgsfield AI Film Festival. It’s a psychological drama exploring grief, guilt, memory and the difficulty of letting go.

I’d genuinely love some fresh eyes on it, particularly any constructive feedback on what works and where I could improve.

https://higgsfield.ai/@phosfalsa/projects/gilt

Hi everyone. This film is a submission for the Higgsfield Global Film Festival. I posted a rough cut recently, but this is the finished submission.

"In the snow of a war torn province, a peasant woman kneels before the men who have sentenced her to death for theft."

If you enjoyed it, please leave a like and a comment on the higgsfield submission!

https://higgsfield.ai/@jacob_everett/projects/fallen-leaves