The revisit
Gene 515 started as a trailer concept in August 2025. This is the vacation revisit: one afternoon, character sheets and Seedance 2 through ComfyUI, seeing how far I could re-shoot last year's idea with this year's tools. Mini cuts of the trailer, not a finished piece. The full concept and lore live on the Gene 515 v1 page.
Character sheets
Midjourney built the reference stills and character sheets first, to lock the look before anything moved.
Mini cuts
A trailer beat, re-shot:
Frog-people fishing tribes by the water:
A raw Seedance generation straight out of ComfyUI:
What I was checking
Seedance 2 had just released. The real question was when AI video generation becomes a production tool rather than a novelty: scene-level coherence, character consistency across shots, motion that doesn't break the illusion. From this revisit, closer than I expected. The horde shots in particular hold together better than the same prompts produced earlier in the year.
What's still missing
Default audio. No real voice work, no music pass. Cuts are arbitrary. Character continuity across scenes is rough. The concept has more in it than the tools can serve yet, but the gap is closing fast.
Tech stack
Seedance 2 (text-to-video, via ComfyUI), Midjourney (reference stills + character sheets), ComfyUI (orchestration), After Effects (assembly), QuickTime.