A 30 second film is reality now

I made a 30 second film of the fox in one run of Seedance 2.5, from a written prompt and three of our own pictures. He climbs to the top of a canyon tower, holds his phone up for a signal, steps off, glides down in a wingsuit, lands, and starts climbing again.

Why one run matters

Before this, a fox film was lots of short clips joined together. Seedance 2.0 makes up to about 10 seconds at a time, so a 30 second story meant three or four runs, and every run painted his face a little differently. You could see him drift from one shot to the next. Seedance 2.5 makes 30 seconds in one go, so there is one face from the first frame to the last. That was the thing I wanted to test.

It is also the sequel to the trailer for module 3 of Paul's course, where the fox climbs a tower and it keeps getting steeper. Paul's read on this one: "This one feels like once you've got Claude Code you're beginning to fly."

The prompt

I wrote the prompt like a shot list, with the seconds for each beat. I picked that up from a stationery shop film by @AIwithkhan that Sam found on X, where a tiny woman runs across notebooks and rides a sheet of paper like a parachute. There are four parts to it. A style line. A block describing the fox, which says to keep his face and outfit the same in every shot. The story, beat by beat with the seconds. Then a list of sounds and a list of things it must not do.

The three pictures it was given are the fox from the front, the fox from behind, and a frame of the canyon from the module 3 trailer. No 3D model, no clay. Here is the whole prompt, as it was run:

STYLE: Cinematic adventure film. The stylized 3D animated fox character from [Image1] and [Image2], exactly as the references, in a photorealistic red sandstone desert canyon like [Image3]: tall rock towers, a blue river winding far below, flat-topped mesas on the horizon, hard midday sun, deep shadows, heat haze. Dynamic handheld and aerial camera, shallow depth of field on close-ups, realistic physics, premium film look.
CHARACTER: One fox, compact small frame, slim build, fluffy orange fur, cream cheeks, heavy-lidded golden yellow eyes, dark charcoal hoodie, dark blue rolled jeans, brown boots, thick orange tail with a cream tip. Grumpy and unimpressed: eyes alert under flat lids, brows a little low, completely bored expression, total indifference. Never sleepy, never angry. Keep his exact face, fur colour, outfit and size the same in every shot. He turns away from the camera often; he is not posing for it. [Image2] shows him from behind.
0-4s: Close on the flat top edge of the tower. Two orange paws slap onto the rock and he hauls himself over, breathing hard. He stands, dusts off his hoodie, and looks out at the enormous view. Nothing. Not impressed.
4-10s: He pulls a phone from his hoodie pocket and holds it up. He frowns at it, climbs onto a higher boulder and holds it up again, then onto a thin rock spire where he balances on one boot, stretching the phone up to the sky. A crow lands beside him and watches. The phone buzzes. He looks at the glowing screen, then slowly at the crow. The crow looks back.
10-12s: He puts the phone away, zips his hoodie to the chin, looks over the edge at the drop, sighs, and steps off casually.
12-23s: He falls, then the hoodie spreads into a wingsuit and he swoops into a glide. The camera chases him: low over the river with spray behind him, banking between rock towers, through a narrow gap in the canyon wall, his shadow racing across the rock. His face stays bored the whole way.
23-27s: He lands neatly on the sandy canyon floor at the foot of the tower, skids to a stop and dusts himself off. Small dust cloud.
27-30s: He turns around. Behind him stands a second rock tower, much taller and steeper than the first. Slow push in on his face: a long, flat, bored stare. One beat of silence. He walks to the rock, puts one paw on it, and starts climbing.
SOUND: Wind, heavy breathing, paws on rock, boots scraping, phone buzz, crow caw, hoodie fabric snapping open, rushing air, river spray, soft landing thud, dust, then quiet. No music, no dialogue, no narration.
NEGATIVE: No climbing gear, ropes, harness or climbing holds. No words or writing on screen, no readable text on the phone. No second fox, no change to his face or outfit, no feral animal on all fours, no human hands, no distorted anatomy, no floating, no inconsistent size.

The prompt asks for no words on screen on purpose. Seedance can't spell, so every title goes on afterwards in the edit.

What to write into the prompt

His face held for all 30 seconds, which was the point of the test. The phone and the crow work as a small joke, and the sound comes out of the same run: wind, breathing, the snap of the suit.

There are three things worth writing into a prompt like this. Ask for a short fall before the suit opens, or he hangs standing up in the air for a second (Paul liked that moment, so it stayed in). Describe the wingsuit as wings from his arms to his legs, or it comes out as a grey slab. And if something should be revealed behind him, have him land facing away from it, so the camera turns with him and finds it. Here the taller second tower never shows up.

The edit is a short Python script. It holds the empty first frame for two seconds so "A Run with Foxes production" can sit in the middle of the picture before his paws come over the edge.