Scene 1 — the kitchen

The first pass of a shot almost never works — and that's fine. What matters is running the prompt, naming exactly what's wrong, and telling Claude how to fix it before you touch Seedance again.

Diagnose before you rewrite

Prompt 1A goes in first, with every locked asset — hero, headphones, kitchen — attached and named the same way they were saved as Elements. The first result has three problems at once: the light is wrong for a morning commercial, the camera just sits there static instead of moving from frame one, and the coffee beat is crammed into the tail end of the same shot instead of getting room to breathe.

One fix for the whole shot list, one fix for this shot alone

Not every problem belongs to the same prompt. The lighting is wrong in every scene, so that fix goes into the shared style prefix once — soft, even daylight from the camera side instead of the contre-jour, shadow-side framing the shot list started with — and gets applied across the whole shot list in one pass. The camera and the coffee pacing are 1A-specific, so those go into a targeted rewrite of just that prompt: open behind the hero and ease around to his profile as he crosses to the stove instead of a static wide, and cut the coffee down to a quick three-stage jump-cut tease.

Rerun 1A and it's a different shot — the camera's moving, and the light finally reads as the bright morning energy the ad needs. From several runs of the fixed 1A, the walk-in comes from one take and the headphones-on beat from another — but the coffee-making moment still doesn't hold up. Rushed, flat, no weight to it.

Lock the props before you isolate the shot

A moment that bad gets pulled out into its own prompt rather than patched — but first, the moka pot and mug drifted in shape and color across every take, and in a tight close-up that drift is the first thing an eye catches. Both get their own clean reference — Claude writes the image-gen prompt for each piece, GPT Image 2.0 renders it — then they get saved into Elements as @moka_cream and @mug_cream so they auto-attach exactly like the hero or the kitchen.

With both locked, the new prompt — 1B — asks for the coffee to become its own fast-cut montage: a high-angle shot straight down on the moka, a worm's-eye view from burner level as the flame catches, then a tight cut on the pour and the sip, all locked to the two referenced props. The result plays like a car ad for coffee — the final cut splices keeper moments from four separate generations, one clip supplying the spoon, another the flame, another the pour, another the sip.

Spell out the choreography, don't summarize it

The last beat is the exit — originally 1B in the shot list, now renumbered to 1C once the coffee montage took its slot. The first pass of the original prompt has the hero just walking out, and it reads flat and boring next to everything before it.

The rewrite spells out the exit move by move: pack the sneakers into the bag, zip it, then dance to the door on two head nods, a shoulder roll on each side, a knee dip, a finger snap, a quarter-spin at the door, ending on a tap of the ear cup — loose and fun throughout. The final edit pulls the zip from one take, the dance from another, and the tap from a third, cutting on action between them.

Three prompts, nine generations, keeper phases pulled off nine different 15-second clips — that's scene 1 built one diagnosed fix at a time.