A short film with Kling 4: stills first, 30-second takes, cut like live action

Kling 4 animates well and badly frames shots it invents. So the image model does the cinematography and Kling 4 does the acting, motion, voices and the in-between. This is how fal's Kling 4 Halloween music video was made (YouTube, 2026-10-30): about 18 key stills on GPT Image 2.5, mostly 30-second Kling 4 takes at 1080p 21:9, then an edit that kept the best seconds of each. Prompt rules and the failure table live in kling-4-prompting.

Generation runs on varg: REST https://api.varg.ai/v2 (the varg-ai skill) or the MCP server https://mcp.varg.ai/mcp. Price every take first (POST /v2/estimate or estimate_cost with "model": "kling_v4").

1. Ask, then go

• Story: 3–6 beats, one sentence each (setup, joke or turn, action, payoff, button line). A 60–90 s film is 3–6 takes.
• Cast: a photo or sheet per character (varg-character-design), the outfit written as a list of details.
• Place: a real, named location if possible ("Washington Square Park", "the Brooklyn Banks"). GPT Image 2.5 researches real places well, which Kling 4 text-to-video does not.
• Look: aspect ratio (21:9 for cinema, 9:16 for social), lens (ultra-wide fisheye, 35 mm, telephoto), film stock and grade, grain, motion blur. One look image (a frame you like) used as "reference only for color grade".
• Budget: a 30 s take at 1080p ≈ $7.05 (705 credits); at 720p about two thirds of that. Plan 2–4 takes per beat.

2. Key stills on GPT Image 2.5

One still per moment Kling must hit: the opening of each beat, any shot with a specific angle (over-the-shoulder, overhead), the peak of an action, the end state. Template: