Establishing shots and realistic hands

Claude's first pass on scene 3 was a tight close-up on Santiago's face, generated straight from the script. It looked fine in isolation, but next to scene 1 he'd clearly drifted — reclined at a different angle, in a different spot in the room. Seedance has no memory of where a character was seated in an earlier shot; it only knows what the current frame tells it.

Anchor the scene with a wide shot first

The fix: open the clip on a wide establishing shot before cutting to anything tighter. A high wide at 24mm with both Santiago and the therapist blocked into the frame — his lounge chair, her egg chair, the distance between them — gives Seedance one unambiguous layout to lock onto. Every later shot in that same generation inherits it, so a hard cut to a close-up doesn't relocate anyone. Skip the wide anchor and the model improvises the room fresh on every cut — the actual failure mode that put scene 3's face in a different chair than scene 1.

Hands are where "photorealistic" gets tested

The next ask added a close-up of Santiago's hands, fidgeting, to sell his nerves. The first pass came back smooth and waxy — technically fine, but the kind of clean CG skin that reads as fake the instant it fills the frame.

The pass that stuck named the anatomy instead of the emotion: pronounced veins and tendons across the backs of the hands, deep creases over the knuckles, visible pores, a faint hangnail, short nails cut a touch unevenly, ruddier skin over the knuckles. That's the level of physical specificity Seedance 2.0 4K needs to render skin instead of guessing at it.

The next round of notes went back to Claude as one plain ask covering the whole beat — wide shot, hands, then the face:

One more pass killed shot 4 outright — it added nothing a static cutaway couldn't. The fix folded its line into shot 3 instead: Santiago looks up at the psychologist, holds a micro-pause, and the sentence breaks off on "And I...", unfinished. That's the three-shot version Claude actually generated.