UGC-Style Video Prompts

Core principle

Video models are decent at motion but worse than image models at solving "doesn't look AI" from zero — skin, lighting, and identity drift across many frames in ways a single still doesn't. Don't text-to-video a UGC clip from scratch. Generate the anchor still first (with the ugc-photo-prompts skill, or reuse one already in the media library), then animate it. The still already solved realism; the video model only has to solve movement and speech, which is what it's actually good at.

The pipeline

1. Anchor still. Already exists in the media library, or generate one with ugc-photo-prompts. This locks subject identity, wardrobe, product, lighting, and skin texture before any motion is added.
2. Motion prompt. Describe only what changes from that frame — camera behavior, body motion, speech. Don't redescribe the subject/setting; the still already carries that.
3. Model pick. Based on whether the beat needs synced dialogue, multiple combined references, or just clean simple motion — see the table below.
4. One clip = one beat. A full UGC ad is a sequence of short jump-cut beats (hook, demo, reaction, CTA), not one continuous shot. Generate each beat as its own clip off the same anchor (or a small consistent set of anchors), then cut them together on the timeline.
5. Lock the voice across beats. Same problem as appearance drift, different mechanism — describe the voice explicitly in every beat's prompt (or pin it with a referenceAudioMediaRefs clip on Seedance) so the speaker doesn't sound like a different person from one cut to the next.

Motion-prompt formula

The still already did slots 1–4 and 6–8 from the photo formula. This is just what's added for motion: