I turned a weekend into a
Phantasy Star music video.

The prompt became a tiny scene specification.

The useful prompts described who was present, where they stood, what moved, what made contact and how the scene ended. Camera language helped organize that information: wide views for geography, closer views for acting, inserts for the important physical detail.

Here is a shortened teaching version of the pattern. The links above contain the longer production prompts, including instructions that the model did not always follow.

SCENE: What changes emotionally or physically?
CAST: Who is here, and which reference defines each person?
STAGING: Where do they stand, look and move?
SHOTS: Establish → prepare → act → react → end.
CONTINUITY: Keep identity, props and screen direction stable.
OUTPUT: Duration, resolution, audio choice and ending state.

For physical action, the order matters. Establish the target. Show preparation. Make contact. Show the response. “Epic battle” leaves the model to invent all four, often at the same time.

Suno made the song. CapCut made the final edit.

I developed the song around a duet with alternating voices and a repeatable chorus. The emotional language needed to work even for someone who had never played the game: love, loss, memory and a reason to keep going. Suno Basic was the music tool I used for this project.

The video generations supplied candidate footage. Before final assembly, the local scripts used FFmpeg to remove unwanted storyboard openings and generated audio, while ffprobe checked dimensions, duration, frame rate and the presence of audio streams. Originals stayed intact beside clearly labeled editing copies.

I used CapCut for the final timeline edit and export. That is where the footage and song became one piece: deciding which moments to keep, how long they should last and where a change of image served the music. The original planning brief targeted three minutes; the published video runs 4:50. The plan was a starting point, and the final edit became its own artifact.

This is also why I kept quiet material in the library. A character reacting, a hand on a shoulder or a paper star can give a musical phrase somewhere to land. Constant spectacle makes every moment compete for the same attention.

What broke was part of the lesson.

The board sometimes became the opening shot. Wan retained or animated the reference grid despite instructions to cut away immediately. I checked those openings and made shorter, silent editing copies at the original speed.

Consistency was a continuing job. Hands, props, costume details, ship geometry and weapons could drift. More adjectives were rarely as useful as a corrected reference, a simpler action or a better selection of footage.

Provider behavior differed from the plan. The project recorded prompt truncation at 5,000 characters in the Replicate Wan wrapper. Later requests were shortened. Other experimental batches failed or hit insufficient credits. Keeping requests and receipts made those outcomes visible instead of silently counting them as completed scenes.

A decoded file is only one kind of success. Technical checks caught broken media. Visual review addressed whether a gesture or scene made sense. Those checks helped me select footage; they did not prove every frame was flawless.

Steal these lessons learned.

1. Skills pay the bills. Reusable agent instructions helped organize production. Practicing direction, staging and editing helped me judge what came back.
2. Have AI organize its own chaos. Ask it to build a gallery that keeps the board, prompt, take and review together. Sometimes the breakthrough is finding the correct file.
3. Test one difficult scene before a batch. Try an intimate gesture and a clear action beat. Check identity, movement and the opening before scaling up.
4. Use the API and the browser where each fits. APIs make repeatable submissions easier to record. Browser assistance helps operate tools you already use. Keep track of which service spends which credits.
5. Keep your taste in the loop. The assistant can produce options and infrastructure. You still decide what the audience should feel, what is wrong and what earns a place in the edit.

For a first attempt, make one scene, one short song section and one finished cut. Choose something you care about enough to revise. The small version teaches you where the workflow breaks before the large version becomes expensive.

And check that the wizard’s staff is in his hand, not through his chest.