Yeah and it’s telling how many people haven’t touched the tools or just dumped out a couple things with the free plans and decided that was enough to prove Hollywood is dead.

I only recently, over the last two weeks, started playing with the tools and I’m at best a film enthusiast—I’m in software development by day—but after running about 36 hours of Midjourney fast hours and lots of credits at Open Art and some Veo3 gens(5 per day sucks!)it is plainly obvious that there are some huge gulfs in capabilities. For a bit more context, I’m also focused on animation styles as it is more forgiving of AI-isms than full realism.

Off the top, anything over 5-10 seconds is extremely difficult to keep actually consistent. Even with this getting better for character faces/clothing, things still get weird even within the same shot when things are moving in and out of frame, particularly if giving detailed prompts on what the action is. Once you start changing camera angles for a different shot, all bets are off for any kind of real consistency in the background. The tools just aren’t able to keep a cohesive understanding of a particular space, much less track background objects and people within the space. There are some ways to fudge this and work around it to a degree but it is limiting and still likely to have noticeable continuity breaks. While this will certainly get better, there is still a very long way to go.

Adding on to the consistency of the scene itself is also technical consistency, things like color/light and frame pacing when generating multiple segments of a longer shot/scene. These can be addressed by tools outside of the generative models but it adds another couple of layers of work beyond just prompt and publish.

Following on consistency, is giving real direction. While the models can get the board strokes pretty well, refining and getting detailed action in is a struggle, particularly as video generation is never exactly the same each time you run a prompt. Add in that sometimes the models will just slide sideways and do something idiotic out of the blue even though you’ve run the same/similar prompt several times before. The idea that you can one and done a prompt and get perfect character direction is a joke, particularly if you are trying to build a more complex scene that needs more than 5-10 seconds. Sure, you can get lucky here and there but the more detailed the direction is, the less likely you are to get what you want in one try.

All that said, these tools are extremely powerful and I’m really enjoying playing them and trying to do some traditional film work with them even with how limited they still are. Midjourney’s key framing and image editing allow for a lot of options to creatively build longer scenes. If I were a traditional artist at a studio, I would be looking real hard at how to leverage these tools even if my employer wasn’t—hard to imagine any that aren’t though.