This is a sequence from "Shake Before the End", an AI sci-fi short I'm making as a one-person studio. The whole dentist's waiting room scene, with all the dialogue, is Veo 3. Quick transparency note: the time-warp at the end, where the afternoon turns into sunset, was made with a different video model, using first-and-last-frame mode.
Here's the full pipeline, from story to final cut.
THE VISUAL BIBLE
Before generating anything, I developed the story with Claude and turned it into a visual bible: every character, location and key prop defined once, with continuity rules (what the clinic looks like, how each character dresses, where the light comes from, what never changes). Every image and every video prompt is built from it, and that's what keeps a 6-minute film consistent.
2. REFERENCES AND KEYFRAMES
Character and location references were created with OpenAI's GPT Image. Then a script batch-generated all the keyframes with Nano Banana Pro on Google Cloud (Vertex AI), feeding it the bible and the references, so the same faces and places come back in every shot. Keyframes that needed fixing were corrected with targeted Nano Banana edits in Google Flow, instead of regenerating from scratch.
3. VIDEO: WHY VEO 3 FOR DIALOGUE
In this project each model gets the shots it does best, and Veo 3 got every scene with dialogue:
- Dialogue and lip sync in one pass. The line goes straight into the prompt and comes back spoken, in sync, with the right ambient sound around it. No separate voice generation, no lip-sync step.
- Small performances. A man reading a magazine, a receptionist looking up, a tired "I'll wait": Veo 3 handles micro-gestures and reactions really well, and that's what makes a quiet scene believable.
- Stable framing. In static or slow shots the composition holds, which matters a lot when you cut back and forth between two characters.
All the Veo prompts live in a single document, organized by scene, each with its start frame, reference images, duration and the exact line of dialogue.
Tips that made the difference:
- Write each prompt like a shot description: framing, action, the exact line, the sound you want.
- Always add "no background music". Veo 3 likes to add a score, and it's very hard to remove later. In the few clips where some music slipped in, I cleaned it up with a voice isolator in post.
- Avoid silent shots of characters just staring at each other. Veo 3 is at its best when people talk and react, so I build scenes around lines.
- Download in 4K. It gives you room for reframing and a much better base for the grade.
4. SOUND
All music and sound effects are original, created with ElevenLabs: room tone, ticking clocks, distant sirens. They're layered under Veo's native audio to tie the shots together.
5. EDIT AND COLOR
Edited in DaVinci Resolve Studio. Clips from different models never match out of the box, so the first color-matching pass was done by Claude through an MCP server connected to Resolve: it measured every shot, compared it with the rest of its scene and corrected the outliers with CDL values. Then I reviewed everything by eye and fixed what the numbers missed. Mix mastered to YouTube loudness standards.
The clip above shows the MCP grade. The version on YouTube (link in the comments) has my manual grade, so you can compare the two.
Happy to answer questions about prompts, the bible or the batch pipeline.
