u/junedhussain123

Not a trailer — a finished short film with a story: a foreigner's first Mumbai monsoon, structured like old Hindi cinema with hand-painted chapter cards (one arrives painted on the back of a truck).

What worked for me on 2.5: (1) the mixed-reference stack is the killer feature — a source video clip as the world/identity anchor plus stills for the gag compositions, in one roll; (2) for continuing an existing shot, feeding the clip itself as reference kept faces and grade almost perfectly — that's how I extended my surrender-dance scene into a whole new gag; (3) character consistency: ONE clean face reference used alone beat every multi-ref combo I tried; (4) explicit physics rules in the prompt ("every umbrella stays open and gripped in its owner's hand, never folds, never changes hands") cut slop dramatically; (5) comedy that survives generation = single-subject actions — a kid faking a high-five lands in one take, synchronized crowd choreography rarely survives.