Title: Dream-to-Video Creative Direction Workflow For

Title: Dream-to-Video Creative Direction Workflow

For the Melius Contra Challenge, I built a reusable AI video workflow for creative directing short cinematic scenes from character references, environment references, mood references, and a written script.

I created it for my own dream-based storytelling practice. I’m writing a Substack series inspired by dreams, and I’m using AI-generated content and interactive web experiments to expand those stories into visual worlds. For this submission, I used one of those dreams as materia prima and worked with Mel step by step to shape the workflow and keep the output close to the vision.

The workflow generates character and environment previews, scene keyframes, individual video shots, a stitched final sequence, and a final restyle pass.

Process:

- Built a modular canvas with separate inputs for characters, environment, mood, and story direction.

- Used the Melius agent to structure the workflow into production nodes: creative brief, character consistency, environment direction, shot list, final prompts, and negative prompts.

- Added preview nodes for Character 1, Character 2, and the environment to lock visual consistency before generating video.

- Created multiple scene keyframes and video shots, then refined them through agent feedback and manual inputs.

- Added a stitching node to sequence the shots into one narrative video.

Feedback: Melius was especially useful as creative direction canvas. It let me stay in the creative direction seat while the agent handled the technicalities, instead of having to solve every small detail by hand.

The main challenge was controlling reference fidelity, hallucinations, and consistency across the workflow. When making changes to prompts inside different nodes, I sometimes had to remind the agent of specific rules to preserve character identity, environment logic, and story continuity. I’m excited to continue refining this workflow and use it moving forward to generate videos for my stories, (which you can read here https://thelaboratorio.substack.com btw), as well as for client work.

Project link: https://app.melius.com/projects/30a8d320-567b-4a16-aeaa-c14e81ec6358/canvas/5bc957a2-4e9a-4bba-a3ac-1fb0f0e22329 I’m also keen to hear any feedback on the workflow, so let me know if you try it.

Social post: https://x.com/xochiworld/status/2056829178020814885