“SHOW, DON’T TELL!” 🎬 AI Filmmakers: Your world had a history before your main character showed up. How do its people tell it? For this scene in "The Alabaster Jar", we built a street performance inside Ashret. Fire breathing, dancing, drums, actors playing up to the crowd, and a storyteller passing down the city’s history. There’s a reason we wanted to do it this way: Style, worldbuilding and heritage. Across many African cultures, dance and oral storytelling are part of how communities carry their history and values forward. Stories are spoken, performed, remembered and passed on, etc. I experienced much of this growing up, which is what I love drawing from... The lead dancer and background dancer's movements draw from Zaouli, a masked dance of the Guro. What's most stark is the music and performance which I researched when trying to come up with the culture of this region in our ficitonal world. On the production side, Seedance 2.5 is really good at working with video references for dance. We gave the references separate jobs: choreography for the movement, images for the performers and costumes (built them from scratch staying true to the reddish and warm tones of the setting and local fashion. The entire region has this color motif) and images references of course for the surrounding footage for the stage and continuity. There’s so much culture worth exploring on screen, that may never make it to theaters through traditional film distribution. When you’re building your own world, look for those opportunities. A performance, a children’s game, exposition wrapping in the lyrics of an old sailor's song.... Give the history a place in people’s lives. That's PEAK WORLDBUILDING! 🎥 Made with Seedance 2.5 at 480p and upscaled to 4K. Reference sheets below 👇
A masked dancer performs in a desert-city street show while a storyteller recounts the city's history.
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This video is God's Way Foundation’s work, shown from their public post. See it on X.
