I had a modest little short-form drama idea in mind, so I decided to mak

I had a modest little short-form drama idea in mind, so I decided to make a 1.5 minute film with Seedance 2.5 and share the whole process. First, without preparing any characters, environments or other references, I turned the entire idea into a story and squeezed it into a single 30 second prompt. I generated that version at 480p. The goal here was simply to see how the characters, lighting, composition and overall visual direction would look and to check whether there were any logical problems or mistakes in the prompt. As I mentioned before, if you give Seedance 2.5 more context than the duration can realistically handle, it tends to compensate by speeding up the scenes. As expected, most of the first version came out feeling fast-forwarded. After reviewing that video, I made a few more changes to the story. Instead of creating the characters and the location from scratch, I decided to reuse what Seedance had already created in the first video. I took screenshots from moments where the characters and environment were clearly visible, then used Seedream 5 Pro to create character sheets from them. For the restaurant, I removed the people from one of the frames and created a clean environment reference. For the charging booth, I generated an image in Midjourney and removed its background. Then I revised the original prompt and split the story into three separate parts, creating three independent prompts. The references I already had were enough for the first two parts. For the third part, realized I would also need a reference showing the restaurant at the end of the night with the curtains closed. So I grabbed another frame from the previous generation and added it as an environment reference for the third prompt. I ran into one continuity issue in Part 3. In the final shot, the restaurant owner was walking outside in front of the restaurant, which broke the continuity. Rather than regenerating the entire 30s sequence, I generated only that 10s specific shot with a new prompt. I cut the problematic section from the original version and replaced it with the new one. At that point, the film was basically done. I added subtitles, upscaled it and finished the edit. I didn't make this for a specific platform, publication or competition. It was mostly an experiment. There are definitely things I could have done differently. I could have added voice references for the characters. I could have created another reference for the restaurant owner carrying her bag. I could also have prepared more angles of the restaurant and used those as environment references. I wasn't completely happy with the closed-curtain version of the restaurant either, so that could have been prepared more carefully as a dedicated reference instead of relying on a frame from the generated video. Overall, if you're thinking about making a 1 to 2 minute film, compressing the entire story into a 30-second test first can be a useful way to see whether the idea works visually. Another useful method is taking frames from the footage you've already generated and using them as references for the next sections. It helps a lot with continuity without requiring you to design every single asset from scratch beforehand. Including prompt revisions and generation time, the whole process took me a few hours. In total, I had to generate eight 30s clips and two 10s clips. One or two of those extra generations were mostly because I rushed a couple of things. If you have any suggestions, ideas or techniques you use for this kind of workflow, I'd love to hear them. I'm leaving the first test video below, along with the references I extracted and prepared from it, and the original prompt I used for that first generation.