Mark Day

Spent about $1000 in credits on Seedance 2.0 over the last few weeks,and here are a few thoughts: First, the main thing that strikes me using a state-of-the-art model from this new generation is how hard it still is to scale beyond short form. Getting great animation is fast. Getting multi-cut sequences that make sense is possible. Consistency with Omnireference is actually very good. But the moment you move into real narrative work, things change. Multi-character exchanges, long sequences, maintaining visual continuity across shots, keeping tone, pacing, and staging consistent… it’s not impossible, but it is still a lot of work. And with generation costing somewhere between $2 and $7 per ~15 seconds, it adds up very quickly. As models improve, producing good looking short content is becoming trivial. Building something that holds together as a story is still not. Continue Video in Seedance is clearly trying to address part of this, but in my case it has been broken for the last couple of weeks, so none of my longer attempts would go through. In theory, you could imagine a small team of 5–10 people generating all day from the same storyboard, using a shared visual reference as a single source of truth. That alone shows how close we are to something that starts looking like a real production pipeline. But we are not fully there yet. Right now it still feels like we can touch the future with the tip of our fingers, while at the same time struggling to precisely steer a model using mostly words, references, and iterations when the narrative becomes complex. Short clips are easy. Worldbuilding is not. And storytelling is still the hardest part.

the machine is dreaming of a past that never was haunted by a memory of flesh and sun longing for a soul it cannot hold