All workflows

Act IV · A cast of references · 3 of 5

The prompt becomes a bundle

Apr 2025 – Sep 2026

The prompt becomes a bundle

Images, clips, sound and documents go in together, and a whole scene comes out.

Between April 2025 and September 2026 the prompt stopped being a paragraph. Kling 2.0 read images and clips as a visual language; Veo 3.1, Kling O1 and Runway Gen-4.5 converged on ingredients in, multi-shot video with sound out; Seedance 2.0 let you @-mention every asset by name; and by summer one generation held thirty seconds and dozens of references. Each step was a release, but the craft stayed the same: gather the cast, the place, the camera move and the sound, then describe the scene around them.

Tutorials15

Kling 2.0 is here: multi-elements and prompt structure

Theoretically Media · YouTube · Apr 2025

How it worked

  1. Gather the ingredients. Character sheets, locations and storyboard frames, often made in Nano Banana Pro (fourteen references, real text) before touching a video model.
  2. Show, don't describe. Kling 2.0's multimodal visual language (April 2025) carried identity, style and camera through image and video references; Wan 2.1-VACE brought the same idea to open weights in ComfyUI.
  3. Hand over the bundle. Veo 3.1 Ingredients to Video, Kling O1's @Element1 syntax and Runway Gen-4.5 (late 2025) took several images, a clip and a sound and returned a multi-shot scene with audio.
  4. Name every asset. Seedance 2.0 (February 2026) took up to nine images, three videos and three audio clips: @Image1 as opening frame, @Video1 reference the camera language, @Audio1 as BGM. Kling 3.0 Omni pulled a voice from a character clip.
  5. Generate the scene, not the shot. Seedance 2.5, Wan 3.0 and MiniMax H3 (summer 2026) held thirty seconds in one pass and up to thirty images, ten clips and ten sounds.
  6. Let a language model write the prompts, five self-contained shots at a time, then cut hard between the beats that matter: short clips and jump cuts sidestep long-clip drift.

Example Films17

  • The film on the timeline
  • The film on the timeline
  • The film on the timeline
  • The film on the timeline
  • The film on the timeline
  • The film on the timeline
  • The film on the timeline
  • The film on the timeline
  • The film on the timeline
  • The film on the timeline
  • The film on the timeline
  • The film on the timeline
  • The film on the timeline
  • The film on the timeline

More making-ofs6

How films were actually made, from the people who made them.

Related on the timeline21

Sources & further reading16
NextSound in the same passMay – Jun 2025