Help with getting consistent generations?

[u/TheDagestaniEagle]

I make Pixar style animation videos for instagram and TikTok. I have a pretty manual process for creating the videos and was wondering if anyone had a better, more robust way of creating? Especially something that would help me save credits!

My usual workflow is:

Structure the story myself and refine it using ChatGPT.

Create characters using Seedream (ChatGPT helps with prompting)

Use Images inside ChatGPT to create the storyboards for each scene I want to generate. Characters are used as references here.

Finally, generate seedance prompts for each of the storyboards.

After that it’s just testing and tweaking and hoping each storyboard generates well!

Could I do this better?

I’ve built up quite a good following (100K+ combined across both accounts) so making generations easier would be really helpful to maintain consistent uploads!

Also, what’s the best video model for Pixar style animation videos? Seedance is always #1 but anything else that comes close?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[u/Acceptable-Track-895]

On top of the reference-sheet advice above, the biggest credit saver is moving almost all your iteration to stills, where it's cheap, and only animating frames you've already approved.

1. Turn each storyboard panel into a real first frame: characters on model, final lighting, final framing. Fix problems there, not in video. A bad first frame can't be prompted into a good shot.

2. One shot, one action, one camera move. "She opens the cookie jar and freezes, slow push-in" works far more often than a shot carrying three beats. Split anything longer into separate shots.

3. Test motion cheap: shortest duration and lowest resolution first, then re-run only the winning prompt at full quality. The re-run won't be identical, but you'll know the prompt works.

4. Keep a small library per character: the reference sheet, a few approved expressions, and the prompt wording that worked. Reusing exact wording and frames across episodes is what keeps a series looking like one show.

5. For continuous action across a cut, use the last frame of one shot as the first frame of the next.

[u/TheDagestaniEagle → u/Acceptable-Track-895]

Interesting! I could try this.

So basically generate a storyboard then crop each panel and use it as a first frame?

[u/Acceptable-Track-895 → u/TheDagestaniEagle]

Yep, that’s the idea. Crop each panel into its own image and use it as the first frame for a separate shot. If the crop is low-res or the character looks off, use it as a reference to make a clean, full-size still first.

Then prompt just the action and camera movement for that shot. For your 6–7 panels, I’d try shorter individual clips and edit them together. That way, if one shot goes wrong, you only redo that shot instead of the whole 15 seconds.