Cinematography

The camera, the light and the details that make a generated shot read as filmed: one designed move and one lens per shot, one motivated light and one look line per film, and the signs that give AI away.

Camera and lens

Every Seedance shot carries one lens and one designed camera move. This section covers choosing the lens from the relationship the shot needs, writing the move at full strength, and checking what arrived.

• The camera law in every prompt: The film's camera personality, condensed into one clause and copied unchanged into every CAMERA block.

• Lenses in degrees: One lens per shot, written as a diagonal field of view from one ladder.

• Distance from the relationship, then the lens: Decide how close the audience should feel, then pick the distance, then the lens.

• Extreme lenses and same-lens sequences: The widest and longest lenses, and any run of shots on one lens, need four holds or they break after two or three shots.

• The camera dose: One designed move per shot, with its size written twice: once in numbers, once as what the frame shows.

• The trigger: A move starts, changes speed or ends because something in the frame or the sound does.

• A composed start and landing: Every move travels from one composed frame to another, and the landing has to be one the move can reach.

• Parallax in metres: Depth is what proves the camera travelled.

• The honest, fallible operator: Every move is one a real crew could perform, and a handheld camera is a person who reacts a fraction late.

• Named locks and breathing frames: A still camera is an exception the plan names for one shot, and it is written out in full.

• Whip pans, devices, the observed hidden-camera feel: Three special camera effects, each written as timing and placement rather than a name.

• Exact paths: When a camera path must be exact, drive it with a grey previsualisation (previz) video, or write it as a chain of stages.

• Measuring the dose on the sample batch: Measure what Seedance delivered against what you wrote, per kind of move, from the sample takes you made anyway.

Light and look

Light in a Seedance prompt is one source the audience could find, held through the scene and through the move. The look is one line, written once per film. This section covers both.

• One motivated, named source: One light the audience could locate, named with its position, direction, quality and colour temperature, and held in every shot of the scene.

• Light for a moving camera: Show where the light comes from early in the scene; after that, the camera can turn and the light can turn with it.

• Materials under one light: When skin, fabric, glass and metal share one key, say how each one answers it.

• Colour through material: Colour lives in things and in light, never in a list.

• Motivated light movement: Light moves only when a source or the camera moves it.

• The look line: The film's look, written once as visible results and copied unchanged into the STYLE block of every prompt.

• The capture in the look line: Who or what is filming each scene, written as what that camera does to the picture; and the film's lens family, only when the whole film has one.

• The clean look is a fix, not the default: A clean digital look rescues a take that came back washed out.

Making it feel real

A generated shot is more often too perfect than wrong. This section names the signs that give it away and the first fix for each. The camera operator, the camera dose and the film's grain have their own topics.

• The "too perfect" tells: A take can be correct and still read as generated.

• Skin, make-up and wear with a history: Real surfaces carry their history.

• The place stays alive: The set never changes.

• Every visible extra has a job: Background people who move together, or stand with nothing to do, give a shot away fast.

• Weight and ease: Motion at one even speed reads as animation.

• The usual AI defaults to avoid: Left undecided, generated work drifts to the same few looks.

• Where the rest lives: Four subjects that make a film feel real have their own topics.