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BEHIND THE WALL
This is my first Contra challenge, and my entry for the CapCut Seedance 2.5 Video Challenge.
I wanted to create a one-take that feels more like a directed fashion film than a sequence of AI-generated spectacle.
The film begins with a woman driving a black 1967 Pontiac GTO through a mountain landscape on her way to work. The camera moves around the car, pushes into the rear-view mirror, rises into space, then drops into Times Square as she arrives in the city.
She exits the car and walks toward a blank poster mounted on a building wall. As she begins to enter the poster, the camera continues independently into the hidden world behind the wall: a working fashion photography studio.
Inside, we see the next stage of the same journey — the shoot itself. The camera moves through the active studio, revealing the model being photographed, the crew, lighting, styling area and production environment.
The camera then returns to the same exterior wall, where the blank poster has become the finished campaign image created during the shoot.
The idea was to build a visual loop: we follow her through a stylized version of an entire working day — the journey to work, her arrival, the photoshoot itself, and finally the result of that work appearing back in the city. She enters an empty image, the camera reveals where that image is created, and the film ends on the completed campaign poster.
WORKFLOW
My usual workflow is different. I normally generate multiple separate shots with as much control as possible, refine them individually, and then manually edit them together.
Creating an entire 30-second sequence as one continuous generated take was therefore new territory for me.
For this project, I first built the film through controlled pre-production: character and vehicle sheets, exterior and interior environment sheets, a complete storyboard, and around nine anchor frames defining the key compositions and transitions.
These references were designed to control character identity, vehicle consistency, architecture, framing, spatial continuity and the camera path across multiple environments.
I then used a structured 30-second Seedance prompt to connect those pre-designed moments into one uninterrupted moving shot: mountain road → space → Times Square → poster → hidden photography studio → final campaign poster.
Working this way meant giving up some of the frame-by-frame control I normally have, but that was also what made the challenge interesting. It was a fun experiment and a useful experience in directing a generative model across a much longer continuous sequence.
Created with CapCut Video Studio and Seedance 2.5.
Really polished. The last few seconds are especially strong 🔥
Thanks, that really means a lot - the ending was actually the core concept of the whole film, so I’m glad that part landed.
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A NORMAL AMOUNT OF SKY
My entry for the CapCut Seedance 2.5 Video Challenge.
I am interested in creating worlds that exist somewhere between magical realism, liminal spaces, dreams, and quiet unease. Places that initially feel soft or nostalgic, but gradually reveal that their architecture, scale, or internal logic cannot be trusted.
For this film, I imagined a girl beginning inside an empty school, a place shaped by repetition, observation, rules, and the pressure to become a recognizable version of yourself. She walks into a faded pastel-pink bathroom and discovers a luminous horse behind a full-length mirror.
The horse represents the possibility of escape, freedom, desire, and a life that cannot be completely explained. When she crosses the mirror, the camera crosses with her. She runs alongside the horse through a fluorescent landscape where rain, flowers, institutional ceilings, and an artificial sky coexist.
An astronaut eventually leads the horse away. I see the astronaut as a figure already accustomed to surviving unfamiliar worlds, while the girl is encountering one for the first time.
As the camera pulls backward, the apparently endless landscape is revealed to exist inside a crystal sphere held by another version of the same girl. She releases the sphere, breaking the boundary around the imagined world. The luminous horse survives in miniature among the fragments.
For me, the ending is about carrying a small piece of freedom back into reality. The escape may be fragile, altered, or impossible to preserve at its original scale, but it does not disappear.
WORKFLOW
I developed the film in CapCut Video Studio using Seedance 2.5. I began with visual references centered on luminous horses, cyan rain, retro astronauts, pastel magical-girl imagery, artificial landscapes, wet reflections, 35mm grain, analog halation, and uncanny institutional architecture.
I then created a timestamped 30-second prompt defining the character continuity, camera path, environmental transformations, sound design, and narrative progression. I generated multiple iterations and refined the mirror crossing, the girl’s visibility, the relationship between the horse and astronaut, the macro pullback from the sphere, and the final release of the miniature horse.
The final camera path moves continuously from the school corridor into the bathroom, through the full-length mirror, alongside the running girl and horse, outward through the crystal sphere, and down to the fragments on the bedroom floor.
Created with CapCut Video Studio and Seedance 2.5.
STILL HERE
A 30-second one-take supernatural short created with Seedance 2.5 in CapCut Video Studio.
An injured 12-year-old boy desperately looks for help, but no one can see him not even his own family. As he moves from a metro to his home and finally to a lonely bridge, one old newspaper reveals the truth he has been unable to face for two years.
Built as a single continuous shot with seamless environment transitions, restrained dialogue, and a final reveal designed to reframe the entire film.
Created for the CapCut Seedance 2.5 Video Challenge.
This is so cool
I created The Red Umbrella, a 30 second emotional anime short about loneliness, kindness, and a connection that quietly travels across generations.
One of my main goals was to make the full 30 seconds feel like one continuous cinematic experience rather than a collection of separate AI generated shots. I planned each scene around camera direction, movement continuity, match cuts, character blocking, and seamless transitions so the story could flow naturally from beginning to end.
I built the project around consistent characters, locations, and props, then directed each moment to preserve continuity across the entire film.
The red umbrella acts as the visual thread throughout the story. What begins as a simple act of kindness eventually reveals a connection to the girl's mother, turning an ordinary object into a memory passed between generations.
My main focus was subtle emotional acting, controlled pacing, consistent anime direction, and a continuous visual flow across the full 30 seconds.
I also included a short workflow video after the final film, showing how I created the assets, structured the scenes, maintained continuity, and brought everything together in CapCut.
Loved the story behind this ❤️ The emotional connection between generations really got me.