Seedance 2 Prompting

Seedance 2 → direct a scene, not a frame

Seedance 2 writes the picture and the sound in the same pass, and that one fact changes the prompt. You are not describing a frame; you are directing a short scene including the camera move and the mix, and the model has to hold all of it together. It follows plain natural language, so the prompts that work read like a short shot brief: who, doing what, where, shot how, and what it sounds like.

That also decides how a multi-scene piece is built: the sound belongs to the clip that generated it, so several Seedance clips cut together restart their mix at every join. video-audio-continuity covers when the whole piece has to be one generation, and the sound-design vocabulary that gets past the copyright filter.

Reach it with find_model for text_to_video or image_to_video, then generate_video / animate_image. Duration set to auto lets the model pick a length to fit the content; pin it anywhere from 4 to 15 seconds instead when the cut matters.

The formula

Two parts do the work:

• Subject — who or what is on screen, concretely.
• Motion — what it is doing, and how.

Everything after is optional, added as the shot needs it:

• Environment — place, time of day, weather, light.
• Look — the finished style, documentary realism through flat 2D.
• Camera — framing and move, briefed the way you would brief an operator.
• Audio — dialogue, ambience, score, or silence.

Loaded up:

A glassblower in a leather apron pulls a glowing orange gather of molten glass from the furnace, turns the rod steadily to keep it from slumping, then lifts a blowpipe to his lips and breathes into it as the bulb swells and the glass deepens from orange toward red. A dim workshop lit almost entirely by the mouth of the furnace, tools and half-finished pieces on the bench behind him, a warm documentary look with the highlights blown out slightly. The camera opens on a slow push-in toward his hands, then arcs around to catch the molten glass against the dark of the room. Audio: the low roar of the furnace, the creak of the turning rod, a faint hiss as the surface cools, no music.

Every layer there is a decision the model no longer invents.

Dialogue, sound and on-screen text

Dialogue goes in double quotes. The model voices it, matches lips to it and times it to the cut. Keep lines short — a long monologue drifts out of sync, so split a speech across two lines and let the cut carry it. Direct the delivery too ("play her line dry and a little proud, his quiet and worn out").

Subtitles work by describing a voiceover and asking for the text along the bottom edge, timed to the voice.

Ambience is a sound brief. Name the sounds you want in the mix, and write "no music" when you mean it. An open prompt comes back scored like a car advert.

Rules

• Spend words on verbs. Motion is what gets animated. "A stunning dancer" gives nothing; "a dancer dropping into a low spin, the skirt flaring, then snapping upright" gives a path to follow.
• Use camera language. Dolly, pan, tilt, crane, push-in, rack focus, locked-off all read cleanly. "Epic cinematic camera" goes a hundred directions.
• Under-directed audio is the common failure. Name the diegetic sounds, the room tone, and call for silence on purpose.
• Physics needs a consequence. "Leaves scatter on each impact", "the mug slides and tips" give the model something concrete to resolve toward.
• Say "cut to" when you want a cut. Spelled out, it honours a shot list far more reliably than it invents one.
• Two clipped lines across a cut beat one long line that loses sync halfway.

The vague-versus-specific gap is the same as everywhere else, and costs more here because a bad clip costs seconds of render. "A beautiful cinematic video of a dancer, stunning, 8k, masterpiece" returns a stock dancer under flat even light. Set the dress, the spin, the heel strikes, the lone spotlight and the guitar, and the model spends its effort rendering your scene instead of inventing one.

Patterns

• Hard motion and real physics — give weight and contact points: a vault with a hand planted on a ledge, gravel kicking up on the landing, a jacket flapping, the camera tracking alongside at chest height.
• A spot that cuts between shots — "built as three cuts in one take", each cut named, a title fading up on the closing frame in a named type class and colour.
• When the sound is the scene — a slow push-in, a naturalistic grade, and a mix of droplets, a far-off bird and branch creak with "no music at all".
• Product hero shot — one satisfying physical moment. A pour, a splash, a tab popping with a fine spray lifting off, macro, hard rim light on the droplets, then the line fading up in the lower third.
• Spokesperson to camera — vertical, phone-camera look, a short spoken line in quotes, a small physical beat on the last word, then a two-second insert cut and back.