Critical Seduction

Inspiration

Dash is a take on one of the many sex-obsessed Bards I've played in my long years as a D&D enthusiast.

How I built it

I used Seedream and Photoshop to build the characters and setting, Nano Banana to pose them in different shots, and Veo3.1 to animate. I used ElevenLabs voice-to-voice for some of the voices to give consistency across the entire short.

Challenges I ran into

Voice generation presented some interesting technical hurdles. Veo3.1 doesn't currently support prompting for specific voice styles, types, or accents - voices are determined by character appearance and dialogue. While this produces more dramatic performances than ElevenLabs' direct voice generation (which tends toward softer, everyday delivery), it meant I couldn't control the vocal direction as precisely as I'd hoped.

To work around this, I used ElevenLabs' voice-to-voice feature after Veo3 generation to match the lipsync timing, which it handles well. However, this process tends to flatten the dramatic energy of the original performance.

Getting performances that felt right required extensive iteration - over $100 in credits across many generations. The timing and emotional energy still aren't quite where I'd like them to be, but that's the reality of working with current AI voice architecture. These are limitations I hope will be addressed as the technology evolves, but they're also part of the creative challenge of pushing these tools to their limits.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

There isn't a lot of traditional dialogue-based AI animation out there. I was very proud to be able to put together a full 2-minute animation to prove viability of traditional linear animation storytelling using AI tools. All said and done this animation took about 72 hours of work, rather than the months it would have taken with a purely traditional animation approach.

What we learned

A lot about the limitations and strengths of the current generation of Gen-AI filmmaking, and also how much the process of filmmaking with these tools is a huge paradigm shift from traditional filmmaking techniques.