At peak hours one task waited over ten hours and then failed. Redoing it meant queuing all over again; the whole day was gone.

I only gave it a character and a background, and it came up with a whole tech-style concept itself, saving me a long prompt. The catch: it picks the style itself, not necessarily the direction I wanted.

With reference images, character identity and scene continuity beat text-only prompts by a lot. Across shots you still weed out bad takes yourself and stitch them in post.

I spent two days testing character consistency and shot replication. All-round reference takes character, scene and motion material at once, and handles camera moves and long takes. Ready for real short-film work.