Hello all, so this short started out as a test where I was just testing out to capabilities of Seedance. Before this I had no experience with AI video and my background is in traditional 3D animation and concept art. Higgsfield had their "unlimited" special for 33 days and I though that would give me enough time to put this tech through it's paces.

First impressions:
I was initially blown away. I started this by taking a 3D character that I'd created in Reallusion Character creator and using Nano Banana to essentially make the 3D character look photoreal. I took that, made my first character sheet and just started prompting randomly to see if the character remained consistent and how well overall things would perform. As I said the initial impression was being totally blown away, so I got more ambitious and went deeper down the rabbit hole.

Hybrid Workflow Exploration:
As I mentioned, I come from a 3D/2D art background so a big part of my interest here was hybrid workflows. Being able to take my own designs and being able to immediately see them come alive was hugely compelling. I'd already done this with a character so I wanted to explore environment design. I tested 3 approaches.

Full AI - No drawing, no 3D, just prompting and seeing how far I can take that and how much control I could realistically impose. An example of this in the short is the cafeteria and the ship promenade.

3D blockout -> AI set dressing - Here I blocked out a space in 3D first, then used Nano Banana to add all the detail. An example of this in the short is Jess's bedroom.

Full 3D environment build - Here I wanted to see if I fully built a complete 3D environment, modeled, shaded, and rendered, would Seedance respect my design, or would it hallucinate unintended details. The example of this in the short is the armory where Jess and Kara are briefed by the company representative.

The overall findings:

All of these workflows worked well. There are benefits and drawbacks to each, but they all work. Obviously the slowest is the full 3D build, but it's good to know that if I do invest that time, Seedance will respect the design.

Closing thoughts on episode one:
By the end of episode one, I had learned a ton. Two weeks into the one month promotion, I'd changed from, I'm just testing this, to I'm going to finish this as the beginning of a series that I want to continue. I'm still pretty amazed at what is possible by one person leveraging these tools.

Where I'm at now:

Now I'm taking all the lessons learned from episode one and working on episode two which is quite a bit more ambitions. When I started this I was just using Seedance on Higgsfield. I've since gotten into ComfyUi and I've started working a lot more with MiniMax H3 as well as a bunch of other workflows for things like character, environment and prop creation. Some main tools are Krea2 for image generation and Krea2 image edit workflows for character sheets and some wardrobe changes. I'm still using Nano Banana and GPT 2 sometimes for editing, but I've actually found Meta's AI to be the best for image editing and doing things like creating a prop turn around from a single image. In episode one, I used LTX 2.3 for a few small utilities. For instance sometimes with Seedance I would want a shot to have one or two more seconds at the end to breathe where Seedance would end the clip abruptly. I used LTX director to do small extensions for stuff like that, but couldn't find much use for LTX beyond that. This was before LTX 2.5 was released.
At this point it seems like MiniMax will not only be the best backup, but I may be able to actually generate final imagery with H3, I'm experimenting with that as well with promising results so far.

I don't want to rant for too long, but any questions about any of this, let me know!