CROAK! is a 30-second one-take AI short film. On a real forest trail, a hiker kneels at a toad's hollow and finds a steel bottle covered in the toad's slime. The slime sends him into a psychedelic trip: in one continuous shot, without cuts, he gets up and keeps walking while his own body morphs through the styles of a century of moving images — a black-and-white ink drawing, a flat colored cartoon, an anime figure wrapped in a flaming golden aura, a pencil sketch with speed lines, a dark silhouette in red fog — while the forest, the light and the camera never break. He becomes himself again, laughing, and then condenses into a single dew drop hanging in the air with the forest refracted inside it; the drop bursts into green light that floods the frame and fades over the empty trail. To be continued.

Made entirely in CapCut Video Studio: the character, location and keyframe images were generated right there with Seedream 5.0 Pro (the same man in each transformed state, isolated on a grey background so the model copies him faithfully), followed by a single Seedance 2.5 generation — 16:9, 720p, 30 s, first frame locked, keyframes as ordered stages, transitions left to the model. Real environment; only the man transforms. No music, no cuts.

A note for the CapCut team and other creators: during the challenge I ran into a platform issue worth documenting. From the same homepage entry, /ai-creator/agent and /ai-creator/studio open two separate backends that do not see each other's projects. My whole project lived in the agent canvas, which would not generate video, while studio could. Support was unable to resolve it; I traced the cause myself and rebuilt the project in studio with almost no credits left — this film is the result of that final attempt. Several earlier generations hung, never returned a result, and still consumed credits; I trust those will be reviewed. I'm sharing this so the platform can be fixed and other creators don't lose days on the same issue.