Crafting Narrative Shorts: A Hybrid Filmmaking Workflow

How to maintain character consistency, style consistency, etc in an AI video. Prosumers can use Google Veo 3’s "High-Quality Chaining" for fast social media content. Indie filmmakers can achieve narrative consistency by combining Midjourney V7 for style, Kling for lip-synced dialogue, and Runway Gen-4 for camera control, while professional studios gain full control with a layered ComfyUI pipeline to output multi-layer EXR files for standard VFX compositing.

Links

• Notes and resources at ocdevel.com/mlg/mla-27
• Try a walking desk - stay healthy & sharp while you learn & code
• Descript - my favorite AI audio/video editor

AI Audio Tool Selection

• Music: Use Suno for complete songs or Udio for high-quality components for professional editing.
• Sound Effects: Use ElevenLabs' SFX for integrated podcast production or SFX Engine for large, licensed asset libraries for games and film.
• Voice: ElevenLabs gives the most realistic voice output. Murf.ai offers an all-in-one studio for marketing, and Play.ht has a low-latency API for developers.
• Open-Source TTS: For local use, StyleTTS 2 generates human-level speech, Coqui's XTTS-v2 is best for voice cloning from minimal input, and Piper TTS is a fast, CPU-friendly option.

I. Prosumer Workflow: Viral Video

Goal: Rapidly produce branded, short-form video for social media. This method bypasses Veo 3's weaker native "Extend" feature.

• Toolchain
  • Image Concept: GPT-4o (API: GPT-Image-1) for its strong prompt adherence, text rendering, and conversational refinement.
  • Video Generation: Google Veo 3 for high single-shot quality and integrated ambient audio.
  • Soundtrack: Udio for creating unique, "viral-style" music.
  • Assembly: CapCut for its standard short-form editing features.
• Workflow
  1. Create Character Sheet (GPT-4o): Generate a primary character image with a detailed "locking" prompt, then use conversational follow-ups to create variations (poses, expressions) for visual consistency.
  2. Generate Video (Veo 3): Use "High-Quality Chaining."
     • Clip 1: Generate an 8s clip from a character sheet image.
     • Extract Final Frame: Save the last frame of Clip 1.
     • Clip 2: Use the extracted frame as the image input for the next clip, using a "this then that" prompt to continue the action. Repeat as needed.
  3. Create Music (Udio): Use Manual Mode with structured prompts ([Genre: ...], [Mood: ...]) to generate and extend a music track.
  4. Final Edit (CapCut): Assemble clips, layer the Udio track over Veo's ambient audio, add text, and use "Auto Captions." Export in 9:16.

II. Indie Filmmaker Workflow: Narrative Shorts

Goal: Create cinematic short films with consistent characters and storytelling focus, using a hybrid of specialized tools.

• Toolchain
  • Visual Foundation: Midjourney V7 to establish character and style with --cref and --sref parameters.
  • Dialogue Scenes: Kling for its superior lip-sync and character realism.
  • B-Roll/Action: Runway Gen-4 for its Director Mode camera controls and Multi-Motion Brush.
  • Voice Generation: ElevenLabs for emotive, high-fidelity voices.
  • Edit & Color: DaVinci Resolve for its integrated edit, color, and VFX suite and favorable cost model.
• Workflow
  1. Create Visual Foundation (Midjourney V7): Generate a "hero" character image. Use its URL with --cref --cw 100 to create consistent character poses and with --sref to replicate the visual style in other shots. Assemble a reference set.
  2. Create Dialogue Scenes (ElevenLabs -> Kling):
     • Generate the dialogue track in ElevenLabs and download the audio.
     • In Kling, generate a video of the character from a reference image with their mouth closed.
     • Use Kling's "Lip Sync" feature to apply the ElevenLabs audio to the neutral video for a perfect match.
  3. Create B-Roll (Runway Gen-4): Use reference images from Midjourney. Apply precise camera moves with Director Mode or add localized, layered motion to static scenes with the Multi-Motion Brush.
  4. Assemble & Grade (DaVinci Resolve): Edit clips and audio on the Edit page. On the Color page, use node-based tools to match shots from Kling and Runway, then apply a final creative look.

III. Professional Studio Workflow: Full Control

Goal: Achieve absolute pixel-level control, actor likeness, and integration into standard VFX pipelines using an open-source, modular approach.

• Toolchain
  • Core Engine: ComfyUI with Stable Diffusion models (e.g., SD3, FLUX).
  • VFX Compositing: DaVinci Resolve (Fusion page) for node-based, multi-layer EXR compositing.
• Control Stack & Workflow
  1. Train Character LoRA: Train a custom LoRA on a 15-30 image dataset of the actor in ComfyUI to ensure true likeness.
  2. Build ComfyUI Node Graph: Construct a generation pipeline in this order:
     • Loaders: Load base model, custom character LoRA, and text prompts (with LoRA trigger word).
     • ControlNet Stack: Chain multiple ControlNets to define structure (e.g., OpenPose for skeleton, Depth map for 3D layout).
     • IPAdapter-FaceID: Use the Plus v2 model as a final reinforcement layer to lock facial identity before animation.
     • AnimateDiff: Apply deterministic camera motion using Motion LoRAs (e.g., v2_lora_PanLeft.ckpt).
     • KSampler -> VAE Decode: Generate the image sequence.
  3. Export Multi-Layer EXR: Use a node like mrv2SaveEXRImage to save the output as an EXR sequence (.exr). Configure for a professional pipeline: 32-bit float, linear color space, and PIZ/ZIP lossless compression. This preserves render passes (diffuse, specular, mattes) in a single file.
  4. Composite in Fusion: In DaVinci Resolve, import the EXR sequence. Use Fusion's node graph to access individual layers, allowing separate adjustments to elements like color, highlights, and masks before integrating the AI asset into a final shot with a background plate.