How I made Pitong Buwan, a Filipino superhero trailer, with Seedance 2.5 in CapCut

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Generation · Sponsor

CapCut with Seedance 2.5

17 clips26 reference assetsOne canvas

Edit · Adobe

Adobe Premiere Pro

Final cutSound and scoreGrain and grade

The idea

When CapCut Philippines offered the credits, I didn’t want to make something trendy. I wanted to answer a question I’ve had since I was a kid: why don’t we have our own Avengers?

Pitong Buwan (Seven Moons) is my answer. Long ago, the serpent Bakunawa swallowed six of the seven moons, and their light fell across our islands. Six ordinary Filipinos catch that light, and every power costs them something.

• Dali Cruz, a jeepney mechanic from Marikina
• Amang, a surfer from Ilocos
• Ines Villareal, a call-centre agent from Makati
• Datu Rasul of Lake Lanao
• Bugan of the Banaue rice terraces
• Lola Sinag, a healer who opens doors between worlds

It started with a story bible

Before I generated a single frame, I wrote a 19-page story bible. It’s the document every prompt, reference and edit decision points back to. If a shot didn’t match the bible, it didn’t make the cut.

Here’s what’s inside:

The shards are the spine of the whole universe. Every power has a pamalit, a price the bearer pays each time they use it hard:

The bible did practical work too. Its consistency rules became the brief for the reference assets: every hero has to read as a black silhouette (Dali’s gauntlet, Amang’s rooster, Ines’s wings, Rasul’s shield, Bugan’s spear, Lola Sinag’s belled staff), every hero owns one colour, and every face is original.

The workflow at a glance

I ran it like a real production, just with AI where the camera would be. Six steps, in this order:

Why character references come first

If the audience can’t recognise Dali from one shot to the next, the trailer falls apart. Video models drift: a face changes, armour loses a stripe, a costume swaps colour. A locked reference image is how you stop that.

Before writing a single video prompt, I built a full character sheet for each hero. Each got a short tag like @dali_hero or @rasul_hero, and every prompt calls the tag and says the character matches the reference 100%.

Every sheet follows the same layout, so the model always gets the same kind of information:

• A turnaround: front, three-quarter, side and back, on a plain grey background in even light
• An expression row: neutral, angry, smiling, shocked, sad, so the face holds in every emotion
• A power pose: the hero mid-action with their power on, so the effect looks the same in every shot
• Detail inserts: the parts the eye locks onto, like Dali’s gauntlet and chest lamp, Rasul’s okir shield and malong, Bugan’s spearhead and clay markings
• The same tag in every prompt, spelled exactly the same

Three of the heroes also have an everyday look for the scenes before their powers arrive: Dali in her mechanic’s work clothes, Amang in his surf wear, Ines in her call-centre cardigan and headset. Same face, different costume, separate tag, so the model never mixes the two looks.

The villains got sheets too. The Kolektor’s includes the six-slot shard case and a small detail that matters to his story: the pink hair clip in his breast pocket.

Here’s the payoff. The same faces, armour and shield hold across three separate generations:

The references carry story, too. Dali’s power makes her forget her father, so his photo is a prop she keeps close.

Locations, props and the serpent

Characters aren’t the only things that drift. A location that changes between shots breaks the sense of place just as fast. So the 26 assets cover three groups:

All 26 live on one CapCut canvas: character sheets at the top, locations in the middle, props at the bottom, and an asset index so every tag is easy to find.

Each location reference is a single wide frame with the light and weather already set, at the time of day the scene happens. The Marikina shop has its half-built jeepney on jacks. The Ancient Sea has all seven moons, before Bakunawa swallows them.

Every location is a real Filipino place, which is half the point. Lake Lanao, the Banaue terraces and the Roxas Boulevard seawall are worlds we already know, now with heroes in them.

Bakunawa needed the most care. A giant reads as giant only next to something human-sized. So the serpent’s sheet shows tiny human figures standing next to it, and every prompt describes it against human height, like a head as tall as forty people stacked.

Prompting and generating in Seedance 2.5

Every shot was generated in Seedance 2.5 inside CapCut. The final trailer is 17 clips, each about 15 seconds long, each with its own prompt. I wrote them the way I’d brief a camera crew, in the same order every time:

• Scene and references: where we are, and which tagged assets are in the shot
• Camera and lens: field of view, camera move and speed
• Action, timed: what happens second by second, with hard cuts at set times
• Physics: weight, speed and scale, so a jeepney falls like a jeepney
• Light, grade and sound: light sources and colour, plus environmental sound only

SCENE: Roxas Boulevard seawall, total eclipse, Manila Bay drained.
REFERENCES: @rasul_hero, @dali_hero, @amang_hero, each 100% matches the reference.
            @bakunawa rises behind them.
CAMERA: low angle, 47° field of view, slow push in.
0–5s: Rasul raises the okir shield as Bakunawa's head clears the water...
AUDIO: waves, wind, shield hum. No subtitles. No background music.

Why CapCut worked for this

Most people know CapCut as the app you cut reels in. For this project it was my pre-production office and my camera. Three things made the difference:

• Everything lives on one canvas. All 26 reference assets sit side by side with an asset index, so I could check a face against a location against a prop without opening another app.
• The references and the generator are in the same place. Seedance 2.5 runs inside CapCut, so a tagged sheet on the canvas is the same sheet the prompt calls. Nothing to export, upload or rename in between.
• Tags turn a prompt into a shot list. Writing @rasul_hero instead of describing Rasul again is what kept 17 prompts short and 17 clips consistent.

Voices, sound and the edit in Premiere Pro

The voices are Tagalog, recorded in ElevenLabs. I wrote the lines to sound like real Filipinos talking, not dubbed English. Lola Sinag’s voice-over carries the story, and the rally cry “Para sa huling buwan!” (For the last moon!) caps the build.

Then came the part I know best. My first shot plan didn’t work: it was all quick cuts, about five shots per beat, and it felt like noise. So I cut the number of shots nearly in half and rebuilt it on longer takes. Dali catching a falling jeepney plays in one unbroken take, and it hits harder than five fast cuts ever did.

Why I finished it in Premiere Pro

CapCut gave me 17 shots. Adobe Premiere Pro is where they became one film. Generated clips arrive looking like 17 slightly different cameras, and the timeline is where you fix that:

• One grade on adjustment layers, so every clip sits under the same look instead of being corrected one by one.
• A fine film-grain overlay across the whole cut. It is the cheapest way I know to make generated shots feel like they came out of the same camera.
• Sound built in layers. Voices, effects, impacts and braams across eight tracks, with one continuous score underneath on the ninth.
• Titles and studio branding on their own tracks, so the hero name cards and the title card could be timed to the music, not to the clips.

The generator makes the pictures. The edit decides what the audience feels. That part is still the editor’s job, and Premiere Pro is where I do it.

If you want to try this yourself

• Write the story before you prompt. The tools amplify a clear idea. They don’t replace one.
• Build your references first. Characters, locations and props, each locked and tagged.
• Prompt like a shot list. Lens, camera move, timed action, physics, light, sound.
• Keep music out of the generations. Add it in the edit.
• Trust your editing instincts. Fewer, longer shots usually beat more cuts.
• Finish in a real timeline. Grade, grain, sound and music are what turn clips into a film.

Thank you, CapCut Philippines

This project exists because CapCut Philippines backed a Pinoy story. Thank you for supporting my craft. Every frame was generated with Seedance 2.5 in CapCut, and every cut was made in Adobe Premiere Pro.

If you have a story of your own waiting, Seedance 2.5 is inside CapCut. Start with the character sheets.

Watch the full trailer on YouTube and tell me which bearer you want to see first.

Questions

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Made with 80k credits from CapCut Philippines. The visuals are AI-generated; the story, direction and edit are by Nico Babierra.