How I Built a Car Commercial With AI (Every Prompt I Used)

2026-08-03 · case-study tutorial · Adil · recording, 35:47 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Video generation & shot direction (also: Assets, references & consistency, Prompting & AI assistants, Failure modes & fixes, Image generation & editing) · mode: Tutorial · tags: prompts shared, one creator's experience, fiction

Adil walks through a five-scene AI car commercial built on Higgsfield in three steps: assets, setup and generations; he says the same workflow fits any commercial by swapping the assets. He locks each asset as an @-named element that Claude writes into its Seedance 2.0 prompts, keeps one look with Color Transfer, cleans every background plate, and screenshots one statics video to fix the car interior and its position. The rest is what broke and how he fixed it: traffic that never looks right (his rule is that the tighter the frame, the less slop), a steering wheel that changed shape, and an airport scene he split into three prompts.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — The finished car commercial played in full

00:01:39 — The three-step workflow: assets, setup and generations

• ★★★ Adil builds a full car commercial with AI in three steps (assets, setup and generations) and says the same workflow fits any commercial, such as sneakers or perfume, by swapping the assets. — 00:01:39 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Plan around reusable assets
• ★ Adil says he is sharing every prompt of the car commercial so viewers can recreate it. — 00:01:39

00:02:08 — Step 1: the Cinema Studio project, elements, the driver's character sheets, face swap, the disguise, the consultant and the showroom with Color Transfer

• ★★ Adil sets up a Cinema Studio project called Car Commercial with a main folder for each scene, a subfolder for assets, one folder per asset type and a fresh subfolder for every iteration, the only way to find anything a few hundred generations in. — 00:02:08 · Cinema Studio · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Plan around reusable assets
• ★★ Adil's tip: always generate product shots on a neutral grey backdrop, which makes them much easier to blend into any background later. — 00:02:36 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Plan around reusable assets
• ★★★ Every time Adil locks an asset, he saves it in Higgsfield as an element whose name starts with @ (car sheet) and attaches the same image in Claude with that name, so Claude writes the name into its prompts and the element attaches itself when the prompt is pasted back. — 00:02:36 · Elements, Claude · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Plan around reusable assets
• ★★ Adil's character sheet request for the race car driver: three panels (a face close-up on the right, a full-body front view of the outfit in the centre, a headless full-body rear view on the left) and no copyright text on the clothing. — 00:03:23 · character sheet · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Build characters for continuity
• ★★★ Adil pastes Claude's character sheet prompt into Seedream 5.0 Pro, which he calls one of the best models for outfits, especially when you feed in your own inputs. — 00:03:46 · Seedream 5.0, Claude, character sheet · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Build characters for continuity
• ★★ To see which model edits the champion photo better, Adil runs the same prompt in Seedream 5.0 Pro and Nano Banana Pro, the two he says tend to work best at editing. — 00:04:15 · Seedream 5.0, Nano Banana Pro · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Build characters for continuity
• ★★ None of the Seedream 5.0 Pro and Nano Banana Pro champion photos worked for Adil: they looked sloppy, the face overly smoothed and the setting unnaturally clean. — 00:04:44 · Seedream 5.0, Nano Banana Pro, AI look · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Build characters for continuity
• ★★★ For a more realistic look Adil switches to Soul Cinema, which he calls easily the most creative model on Higgsfield, with generations that feel more alive. — 00:04:44 · Soul Cinema, AI look · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Build characters for continuity
• ★★ Adil notes that a character reference sheet cannot be attached in Soul Cinema. — 00:04:44 · Soul Cinema, character sheet · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Build characters for continuity
• ★★ Adil has Claude write a face-swap edit prompt (replace the face in the Soul Cinema photo with the face from his character sheet) and tests it in Nano Banana Pro and Seedream 5.0 Pro. — 00:05:14 · face swap, Claude, Nano Banana Pro, Seedream 5.0, character sheet, Soul Cinema · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Build characters for continuity
• ★★★ Adil's big lesson: do not try to get everything out of one model; he lets Soul Cinema act the scene and swaps his own face in afterwards. — 00:05:41 · Soul Cinema, face swap · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Build characters for continuity
• ★★ Adil asks for a fake stick-on mustache on the disguised hero on purpose: the hero peels it off on camera in scene two, and a real mustache would make that shot make no sense. — 00:06:44 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Build characters for continuity
• ★★ In the disguise outfit edit, Nano Banana Pro kept the face better and Seedream 5.0 Pro kept the fabric better; Adil went with Nano Banana Pro. — 00:06:44 · Nano Banana Pro, Seedream 5.0 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Build characters for continuity
• ★★ Adil generates the sales consultant from scratch in Soul Cinema with no reference photo, starting from a simple Claude prompt for a three-view character sheet on a neutral background. — 00:07:14 · Soul Cinema, character sheet, Claude · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Build characters for continuity
• ★★ For the consultant's character sheet Adil insists on no harsh shadows and no artificial studio light on the character. — 00:07:43 · character sheet · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Build characters for continuity
• ★★★ When the face in a character sheet's close-up differs slightly from the full-body face, which becomes a problem in the videos, Adil cuts the face out of the full-body shot in any image editor, which he says saves a ton of credits. — 00:08:07 · character sheet · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Build characters for continuity
• ★★★ Adil's first prompts are always lazy on purpose: for the showroom in Soul Cinema he typed only "car commercial look, interior of a car dealership" to nail the vibe and colours before the final location. — 00:08:31 · Soul Cinema · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Assemble a scene from locked references
• ★★★ In the Image tab Adil selects Soul Cinema, clicks Color Transfer and uploads the vibe image; every image after that pulls from the same palette, which keeps the whole film looking like one film. — 00:08:31 · Soul Cinema · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Assemble a scene from locked references

00:09:16 — The key, and loading the custom Seedance 2.0 skill in Claude

• ★★ For the video stage Adil uploads to Claude the custom skill he built for Seedance 2.0, free in the description. — 00:09:16 · Claude, Seedance 2.0

00:10:01 — Scene 1: the dealership

• ★★ For scene one Adil spelled out his vision beat by beat; every take of the first prompt had a usable shot, and he stitched the scene from four takes (the opening, the wide shot, the keys shot and the rest). — 00:10:01 · Seedance 2.0 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Assemble a scene from locked references

00:10:47 — Scene 2: the girl, the gas station, the clean plate, the statics video and the cabin dialogue

• ★★ Adil says casting is still casting in AI: if a face does not feel like a lead, do not settle and keep iterating. — 00:11:42 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Cast and clean the plate
• ★★ Adil generates location images at a three-quarter angle, which he calls really important for locations. — 00:12:05 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Cast and clean the plate
• ★★★ Adil's rule: clean the plate (the background image): before generating any video, edit out of the location image anything a video model can break, such as text, background clutter and random cars. — 00:12:05 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Cast and clean the plate
• ★★ At the gas station Seedance 2.0 kept morphing the distant cars into clones of the hero's red car until Adil edited them out in a second pass. — 00:12:34 · Seedance 2.0
• ★★★ Because the model will not keep track of where the hero is between scenes, Adil connects the dealership and the gas station with a couple of shots of the hero cruising through the city. — 00:13:52
• ★★ Of four Seedance 2.0 takes of the city drive one worked, and Adil kept only its first and last shots; the top-down aerial over traffic broke every time. — 00:14:15 · Seedance 2.0 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Repair continuity with references
• ★★ In the hero's driving interior shots, Adil makes sure he never looks directly at the camera. — 00:15:00 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Repair continuity with references
• ★★★ For the car interior Adil generates one statics video in Seedance 2.0 instead of five separate images, because image models shift the lighting or details between edits while every frame of a video matches; he pauses on each shot, screenshots it and saves it as an element. — 00:15:26 · Seedance 2.0, Elements · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Repair continuity with references
• ★★★ A screenshot of the parked car from the statics video becomes the position lock for every gas-station shot: the image that tells Seedance 2.0 exactly where the car stands. — 00:15:26 · Seedance 2.0 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Repair continuity with references
• ★★★ When a dialogue request is a lot for one generation, Adil ends it with the line "If this is too much for one prompt, split it in two", and Claude split it. — 00:16:13 · Claude · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Direct dialogue through selection
• ★★ In the mirror shot the hero's eyes come back up as the decision lands; Adil says that one second of doubt makes him feel like a character and not just an NPC. — 00:17:13
• ★★ Watching the whole cabin scene together, Adil found the disguise removal too fast and asked Claude for an edit giving it more breathing room before the action. — 00:17:40 · Claude · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Direct dialogue through selection
• ★★ Adil references the acting from the previous prompt in the next one, since it turned out well. — 00:18:24

00:19:42 — Scene 3: downtown, highway and tunnel, and what breaks in driving shots

• ★★ For the downtown location Adil asked Claude for a modern street with no cars and no people, generated a batch with Color Transfer, tested the images in Seedance 2.0 and kept the ones that did not change in motion. — 00:19:42 · Claude, Seedance 2.0 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Make complex driving readable
• ★★★ In Adil's driving batches every traffic light came out wrong (red while everyone drives, or red and green at once); he could not fix it, so he frames intersections out. — 00:20:18 · Seedance 2.0 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Make complex driving readable
• ★★★ A wide FPV aerial flyover exposes all the traffic at once, and in Adil's takes that traffic went wrong: cars crossing the solid line and drifting out of their lanes. — 00:20:18 · Seedance 2.0 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Make complex driving readable

• ★★★ Adil cuts overtakes and dense traffic, which never look right, and gives his one rule to remember: the tighter the frame, the less slop you get. — 00:20:55 · AI look · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Make complex driving readable

  “The tighter the frame, the less slop you get.”

• ★★★ Adil's move for any dynamic sequence: generate multi-shot, batch a lot and cut the best parts together. — 00:20:55 · multi-shot prompt, rebatching · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Make complex driving readable

• ★★★ In a six-angle cabin prompt, shot one is a plain frontal view into the cabin (him driving, her in the back, both belted) to lock the blocking; when people or objects teleport between shots, Adil starts with a shot that clearly defines who is where. — 00:21:40 · multi-shot prompt · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Make complex driving readable
• ★★ In the highway sequence Seedance 2.0 failed three ways: under an FPV drone the traffic wandered between lanes, it could not make a match cut from the steering wheel to the front wheel, and the dashboard numbers turned to mush. — 00:22:35 · Seedance 2.0 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Make complex driving readable
• ★★★ One highway shot survived every take (the car ripping past and the camera flinching from the wind blast), so Adil kept it and rebuilt the scene around it. — 00:22:35 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Make complex driving readable
• ★★ Adil says mostly tight, unique angles helped the model pull the whole highway scene together. — 00:23:17

00:24:05 — Scene 4: the checkpoint in four iterations

• ★★ The checkpoint scene took Adil four iterations, which he shows as the rarely seen part of AI filmmaking: directing actors that don't exist. — 00:24:05 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Correct performance one variable at a time
• ★★★ After a first checkpoint take with terrible acting (the hero far too excited, the girl annoyed), Adil's notes were: reduce the hero's smirk, write the girl as anxious from the speed, have her deliver her line with suspicion and curiosity, and add the logo element. — 00:24:36 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Correct performance one variable at a time
• ★★ The second checkpoint take overcorrected the hero: his smirk was gone, and with it all the fun. — 00:25:12 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Correct performance one variable at a time
• ★★★ With the logo element added the logo held, but the steering wheel kept changing shape every take; Adil locked it with the steering-wheel close-up screenshotted from the statics video and saved as an element. — 00:25:12 · Elements · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Correct performance one variable at a time
• ★★★ Adil's fix for the newspaper in a controller's hands: generate it as its own image, with big bold headlines and the small text pre-blurred on purpose. — 00:27:43 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Stabilize a comic set piece
• ★★★ Asked for five shots, the model gave six or seven, so Claude wrote it as a hard rule: exactly five shots and four cuts, no extra inserts. — 00:27:43 · Claude
• ★★ When a controller's cap flew off and vanished, Adil wrote it into the prompt as a landing: in the wide shot the cap drops onto the asphalt right in front of the camera. — 00:27:43

00:29:06 — Scene 5: the airport drift-park, the dialogue and the exit

• ★★★ Rather than describe in the prompt where the car should drift-park, Adil draws a simple diagram of where he wants it parked and uploads it straight into Claude. — 00:29:06 · Claude · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Block the finale backward
• ★★★ When the car stopped in a different spot every generation, Adil saw too much crammed into one prompt and split the airport scene into three: the arrival, the dialogue and the exit. — 00:30:08 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Block the finale backward
• ★★★ Adil shoots the airport dialogue before the arrival, because the dialogue is the heart of the scene and decides where the car sits and what is outside every window. — 00:30:34 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Block the finale backward
• ★★★ For the exact parking spot Adil scribbles a red mark on the location image where the car stops and saves it as a new element. — 00:30:34 · Elements · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Block the finale backward
• ★★ Adil asks Claude for only the first shot, the drift-park from the diagram image, and to make sure none of the diagram's blue and red stripes show up in the video. — 00:31:21 · Claude · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Block the finale backward
• ★★ Parking the car between two others would have forced a parallel park out in the exit shot, so Adil had Claude clear the parking area: no other cars in front or behind. — 00:31:52 · Claude · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Block the finale backward
• ★★ In the first exit takes the geography was wrong: the girl got out by the wrong door straight into traffic and the car was parked on the wrong side of the road. — 00:32:52 · also in: Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Finish the story in the edit
• ★★ Watching the assembly, Adil found the ending unfinished because the hero simply vanished from his own film, so he added one last beat for him. — 00:32:52

00:33:41 — The full commercial again

00:35:15 — Recap and sign-off

Threads in this video

• promised · Adil: share every prompt of the AI car commercial (2026) — Adil says he is sharing every prompt of the car commercial so viewers can recreate it. (00:01:39)
• kept · Adil: share every prompt of the AI car commercial (2026) — The video's description says every prompt of the car commercial is free and links them. (video description)
• refine · Which image model should be used for keyframes, edits, text and outfits? — In the disguise outfit edit, Nano Banana Pro kept the face better and Seedream 5.0 Pro kept the fabric better; Adil went with Nano Banana Pro. (00:06:44)
• refine · How do you avoid the AI (plastic) look? — For a more realistic look Adil switches to Soul Cinema, which he calls easily the most creative model on Higgsfield, with generations that feel more alive. (00:04:44)
• restate · How do you prepare footage and references for a clean face or character swap? — Adil's big lesson: do not try to get everything out of one model; he lets Soul Cinema act the scene and swaps his own face in afterwards. (00:05:41)
• restate · How do you keep a character the same across shots? — When the face in a character sheet's close-up differs slightly from the full-body face, which becomes a problem in the videos, Adil cuts the face out of the full-body shot in any image editor, which he says saves a ton of credits. (00:08:07)
• refine · How do you spend fewer credits? — When the face in a character sheet's close-up differs slightly from the full-body face, which becomes a problem in the videos, Adil cuts the face out of the full-body shot in any image editor, which he says saves a ton of credits. (00:08:07)
• refine · Should prompts be short or long? — Adil's first prompts are always lazy on purpose: for the showroom in Soul Cinema he typed only "car commercial look, interior of a car dealership" to nail the vibe and colours before the final location. (00:08:31)
• refine · How do you keep a consistent colour palette and visual style across generated images? — In the Image tab Adil selects Soul Cinema, clicks Color Transfer and uploads the vibe image; every image after that pulls from the same palette, which keeps the whole film looking like one film. (00:08:31)
• refine · How do you remove unwanted objects from a shot? — Adil's rule: clean the plate (the background image): before generating any video, edit out of the location image anything a video model can break, such as text, background clutter and random cars. (00:12:05)
• refine · How do you keep a location, product or prop the same across shots? — For the car interior Adil generates one statics video in Seedance 2.0 instead of five separate images, because image models shift the lighting or details between edits while every frame of a video matches; he pauses on each shot, screenshots it and saves it as an element. (00:15:26)
• first on record · How do you generate driving shots with traffic? — Adil cuts overtakes and dense traffic, which never look right, and gives his one rule to remember: the tighter the frame, the less slop you get. (00:20:55)
• refine · When a generation fails, should you generate more takes, fix the prompt or start over? — One highway shot survived every take (the car ripping past and the camera flinching from the wind blast), so Adil kept it and rebuilt the scene around it. (00:22:35)
• refine · How do you direct a multi-shot sequence? — In a six-angle cabin prompt, shot one is a plain frontal view into the cabin (him driving, her in the back, both belted) to lock the blocking; when people or objects teleport between shots, Adil starts with a shot that clearly defines who is where. (00:21:40)
• refine · How do you direct a character's acting in a video prompt? — After a first checkpoint take with terrible acting (the hero far too excited, the girl annoyed), Adil's notes were: reduce the hero's smirk, write the girl as anxious from the speed, have her deliver her line with suspicion and curiosity, and add the logo element. (00:24:36)
• refine · How do you keep on-screen text and fonts intact in a generated video? — Adil's fix for the newspaper in a controller's hands: generate it as its own image, with big bold headlines and the small text pre-blurred on purpose. (00:27:43)
• refine · How do you keep a video model from adding unwanted cuts or camera changes? — Asked for five shots, the model gave six or seven, so Claude wrote it as a hard rule: exactly five shots and four cuts, no extra inserts. (00:27:43)
• refine · How do you control where the camera is in a known set? — For the exact parking spot Adil scribbles a red mark on the location image where the car stops and saves it as a new element. (00:30:34)
• refine · How do you get precise motion (dance, action, choreography)? — Rather than describe in the prompt where the car should drift-park, Adil draws a simple diagram of where he wants it parked and uploads it straight into Claude. (00:29:06)
• restate · Which LLM should be used to write video prompts? — For the video stage Adil uploads to Claude the custom skill he built for Seedance 2.0, free in the description. (00:09:16)

Where the stories that moved here went next

• Adil: share every prompt of the AI car commercial (2026) — kept

Mentioned

Central: Adil's AI car commercial · character sheet · Claude · Seedance 2.0 · Soul Cinema

Also: Concepts: AI look · clean plate · face swap · match cut · multi-shot prompt · position lock · rebatching · statics video

Products: Cinema Studio · Color Transfer · Elements · Nano Banana Pro · Seedance 2.0 Claude skill (car commercial) · Seedream 5.0

Also centred on Adil's AI car commercial: Cinematic Car Commercial — Full Breakdown · Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Correct performance one variable at a time · Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Cast and clean the plate · Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Direct dialogue through selection · Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Plan around reusable assets · Direct a cinematic AI car commercial: Assemble a scene from locked references

Replied to by

• Cinematic Car Commercial — Full Breakdown

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