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Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 26, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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The stories themselves are pretty easy. There's a lot of people who already had 'stories' in their heads that they wanted to bring to the screen, to the point where script-fic is a little derogatory in fanfic spaces. And we're at the point where you can give an LLM a pretty rough idea and get a coherent story out from them (cw: 30k words AI-generated story, painfully full of obvious spaces for improvement and still about on par with recent Disney output).

The tech's just hard. There's people messing with it, and for short periods you can get human-like emotion and acting, especially if you're open to pretty non-standard definitions of human (cw: sound, hellhound with human teeth). And then the background fades into a dream, or the character suddenly looks subtly different, or things start clipping, or the lipflaps don't match up with the actions.

Some of that's because people are just dabbling hobbyists: if there are people building their own unique voice clones, converting renders or live video into to pose2video work, or doing a lot of layering, there's definitely no one publicly doing all of those things combined. There's probably a way to make it work, by exploiting first-frame-last-frame and controlnet. But that requires a pretty sizable set of storyboards, and a stronger vision, and the ability to maintain focus when you're presented with something close but not quite good enough..

It's also just hard to do at home. Wan2 or LTX kinda work on an nVidia 3090 or better, but it's minutes-per-generation in the simplest cases. Add on that overhead and it can take the better part of an hour to make a single ten-second clip. With the right workflow or tooling you might be able to make that work out - that's still about a week per hour of video - but right now those workflows are things you'd have to build yourself.

I'd expect we'll eventually get some sketch-focused artist or rough animation-focused modeler working directly with them, and it'll have some major benefits, but I couldn't tell if you if that'll be a weeks, months, or years.

Higgsfield is making some series with Seedance 2.0 and Nano Banana:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=LQ-vSa9_H98 https://youtube.com/watch?v=digHr6k38x0

I just can't stand watching this genre (superhero action movie or whatever), more than 30 seconds at a time, but it looks fine on a technical level. It would be great to have something with a bit more interesting story.