The Hat Trick
Find an accomplice
Prompt 3
SEEDANCE 2.5 · 30S · 9:16 · EIGHT-STAGE MAGIC SHOW FORMAT: 30 seconds / 9:16 vertical / one continuous handheld shot, no cuts / comedic magic-show performance STYLE: Photorealistic smartphone footage, bright cream living room, soft daylight from the window on the left, natural color, shallow depth of field, true handheld iPhone feel with breathing sway and small reframes, no smooth gimbal. A real puppet filmed at home, not CGI. REFERENCES: @Image 1 defines the puppet (plush peach terry-cloth skin, dark curly hair, black square sunglasses, drawn-on mustache and goatee, cream cable-knit sweater, grey trousers, plush mitten hands), the room, and the brown suede and cream chunky sneaker used in Stage 4. Ignore that the sneaker is already in hand. @Image 2 defines the black smartphone: size relative to the puppet hands, rounded frame, one-hand grip. Do not inherit its screen content. @Image 3 defines the exact phone screen content for Stage 7: dark-mode social profile page. Reproduce faithfully. Ignore the status bar time. VIDEO PROMPT: The subject is one hand puppet, the puppet from @Image 1, seated at the front edge of the travertine coffee table facing camera, eye-level medium shot from hair to trousers. The puppeteer is hidden below frame; only the puppet's two plush hands touch the props. The puppet moves like a real hand puppet: head bobs, shoulder wiggles, quick tilts, proud showman attitude. [Stage 1 — approximately 0 to 4s] Initial state: the puppet holds a black felt top hat upside down in its left hand, open crown up, brim at chest height. A real live budgerigar, sky-blue body, white face, fine black wing barring, perches calmly on the puppet's right shoulder. The puppet gives the camera a confident nod and raises its right hand. End state: hat in left hand, bird on right shoulder, right hand raised. [Stage 2 — approximately 4 to 8s] Continue. The right hand gently cups the budgerigar, lifts it off the shoulder and lowers it into the open hat until it disappears below the brim. The puppet pats the hat once. End state: hat upright in left hand, right hand on the brim, shoulder empty. [Stage 3 — approximately 8 to 11s] Continue. The puppet tips the hat so the open crown faces the camera and fills the lower third of frame. The interior is completely empty: smooth black satin lining, no bird, no feathers. The puppet shrugs and tilts its head. Camera pushes slightly toward the opening. End state: empty hat opening facing camera, in the left hand. [Stage 4 — approximately 11 to 15s] Continue. The puppet turns the hat crown-up, plunges its right hand deep inside past where the bottom should be, then pulls straight up. The sneaker from @Image 1 rises out toe first, full size, laces swinging, clearly larger than the hat opening. The puppet lifts it beside its face, side profile to camera. Camera tilts up to follow. End state: sneaker high in the right hand, hat in the left hand. [Stage 5 — approximately 15 to 19s] Continue. The puppet lowers the sneaker to chest height in its right hand. With the left hand it pinches the edge of the hat brim with two fingers and lifts; as it lifts, the stiff hat instantly softens and collapses into one square black silk handkerchief hanging from its fingers, edges rippling, no hat remains. The puppet drapes the handkerchief fully over the sneaker so the shape is covered. End state: right hand holds a cloth-covered object, left hand holds the top corner of the handkerchief. [Stage 6 — approximately 19 to 23s] Continue. The puppet whips the handkerchief away upward with the left hand. Under it the sneaker is gone; the right hand now holds the black smartphone from @Image 2, screen facing camera, still dark. The handkerchief falls out of frame below and is never seen again. The puppet does a proud shoulder wiggle. Camera gives a small jolt, then steadies. End state: dark phone in right hand at chest height, left hand free. [Stage 7 — approximately 23 to 27s] Continue. The puppet extends the phone toward the lens until it fills most of the frame width; the screen lights up showing the exact profile page from @Image 3, sharp and readable. Camera racks focus to the screen. End state: phone screen dominating frame with the profile displayed. [Stage 8 — approximately 27 to 30s] Continue. The left plush hand enters from above and taps the top edge of the screen once. On that tap the profile vanishes and the screen turns solid black with exactly two lines of clean white centered sans-serif text: the upper line reads Comment and the lower line reads "Prompt" with straight double quotation marks around the word Prompt. No other text, icons or logos. The puppet peeks over the phone and nods. Camera holds steady on this final frame to the end. AUDIO: <Quiet room tone.> <Budgerigar chirp at the start, a tiny flutter as it enters the hat.> <Felt rustle when the hat tips.> <Soft thud as the sneaker emerges.> <Silk swish on the transformation and the whip-away.> <Phone wake tone at 23s, one soft tap at 27s.> (Playful lo-fi jazz, brushed drums and upright bass, quiet throughout, a cymbal hit on each reveal, clean bass note on the final frame.) No dialogue. CONSISTENCY: Exactly one puppet, one bird, one hat, one sneaker, one handkerchief, one smartphone. Keep the puppet's face, sunglasses, hair, sweater and trousers identical to @Image 1; the sunglasses never come off. Room, lighting and camera position unchanged. Hat in left hand until it becomes the handkerchief; sneaker and smartphone only in the right hand. Once an object vanishes it does not reappear. The puppeteer stays hidden below frame. NEGATIVE PROMPT: no human hands or arms, no second puppet, no duplicate sneaker or phone, no bird reappearing, no feathers in the hat, no hat after the transformation, no extra text or watermark, no misspelled words, no morphing on the puppet face, no sunglasses removal, no CGI glow or particles, no smooth gimbal, no cuts, no lighting or room change.
Other prompts in this tutorial
Prompt 1
NANO BANANA PRO · IDENTITY-LOCKED PUPPET PORTRAIT IDENTITY — this is the most important part of the prompt. Image 1 is the identity reference. The puppet's face must map 1:1 onto the man in Image 1: same face proportions, same eye line, same nose length and width, same mouth width and position, same jaw. No caricature, no exaggeration of any feature — the only change is the material. Facial specifics from Image 1 to reproduce exactly: a soft oval face with medium-full cheeks and a gently rounded chin; a straight, medium-sized nose with a slightly rounded tip; a closed-lip half-smile, relaxed, corners lifted a little more on one side, no teeth showing; a neatly trimmed dark-brown mustache sitting just above the upper lip; light, slightly patchy dark stubble on the chin and along the jawline, not a full beard; medium-length loose dark-brown curls with relaxed ringlets falling over the forehead and framing both sides of the face — natural volume, not a tight afro and not a dome; black Wayfarer-style sunglasses with a straight top bar and slightly tapered lenses, worn on the nose; a small tattoo on the outer forearm. Now rebuild him as a handmade sock puppet. Do not stylize the photograph — construct the character from real textile materials, keeping the proportions above so that anyone who knows him recognizes him at a glance. Materials: the puppet's head and a modestly proportioned neck are sewn from a single warm peach-beige cotton terry sock, its knit loops and pilling visible, with soft wrinkles where the fabric bunches. Facial features are separate sculpted pieces glued onto the sock, sized true to Image 1: a nose in matte speckled polymer clay with a rough sanded surface, and closed lips in a darker terracotta clay with fine tool scratches and a faint gloss, shaped into his exact half-smile. Hair is his loose dark-brown ringlets recreated in coarse clipped wool roving curled into soft individual loops, a few frizzy stray fibers catching the light; a matching trimmed wool mustache and a light scatter of short stubble fibers glued along the chin and jaw. Real black plastic Wayfarer-style sunglasses, scaled to the puppet, sit on the clay nose. The tattoo is painted onto the sock fabric of the forearm. Outfit: a Kith-style head-to-toe look, as if pulled from the Kith online store, remade in miniature textiles — an oversized cream heavyweight cable-knit crewneck sewn from a real chunky knit with a ribbed collar, and wide-leg pleated stone-colored trousers in miniature wool. A small Kith wordmark embroidered on the chest in thread, kept subtle. Every garment shows real yarn, seams and fabric fuzz. He holds up one New Balance 9060 sneaker toward the camera in a stuffed sock hand with stitched fingers, proudly presenting it: a chunky miniature version in a stylish colorway of sea salt, quartz grey and muted sage, built from real suede scraps, mesh and thick cream laces, the New Balance "N" done as a small fabric appliqué rather than a printed logo. Setting: a stylish, Pinterest-worthy fashion apartment, softly out of focus behind him — a cream bouclé sofa, a travertine coffee table, a chrome arc floor lamp glowing warm, a monstera, a wooden shelf with a few sneakers, afternoon window light from the left. The room is real and full-scale; the puppet is held up in the foreground, filling most of the frame. Camera: a close phone portrait, composed like an iPhone 15 Pro 77mm portrait-mode shot at eye level with the puppet, head facing the camera squarely so the face reads clearly, shallow depth of field, tack-sharp focus on the clay nose, sunglasses and knit fibers, the room dissolving into warm creamy bokeh with soft highlight blobs from the lamp. Warm tungsten and window light mixing, natural HDR look, slight sensor grain in the shadows, no studio polish. Constraints: one puppet, one sneaker in hand, sunglasses on at all times, face proportions locked to Image 1, no caricature, no oversized nose or lips, no teeth showing, no human skin, no CGI or 3D-render smoothness, no plasticine claymation look, real textile and clay materials only, no readable text other than the small Kith and New Balance marks, no logo drift, no watermark.
Prompt 2
NANO BANANA PRO · PROP SWAP + SCREEN LOCK Image 1 is the master reference: the hand puppet, his face, hair, sunglasses, outfit, the puppeteer's hand, the living room, the lighting and the phone-portrait camera style. Reproduce all of it exactly. Image 2 is the screen content reference only: an Instagram profile screenshot. Use it for nothing except what appears on the phone screen. Lock: the puppet exactly as in Image 1 — terry-cloth face, curly wool hair, black Wayfarer sunglasses, needle-felted mustache and stubble, the closed-lip half-smile, cream cable-knit sweater, stuffed terry hands, the puppeteer's forearm entering from the lower right. The same room, the same sunlit daylight, colors and grain. Change: remove the sneaker. The puppet holds a modern iPhone in its stuffed hand and pushes it right up to the camera, screen facing the lens. The phone is very close to the lens and dominates the frame: the entire phone, including all four corners and its edges, fits inside the 9:16 frame with only a thin margin of the blurred room visible around it — nothing of the phone is cropped. It is held nearly straight-on, with a barely perceptible tilt for realism. The puppet's terry fingers wrap around the phone's edges in the foreground. Behind the phone, about an arm's length back, the puppet's head and shoulders are visible in the upper part of the frame, out of focus but clearly readable — the round dark curls, the black sunglasses, the half-smile, the cream sweater — leaning in as if proudly showing off his profile. Screen: the phone displays Image 2 exactly, as a real screenshot shown on a real screen — the dark-mode Instagram profile with its status bar, header, the round profile photo, the name, the three stat columns, the bio lines, the link row, the highlight pills, the professional dashboard card, the three buttons, the story circles, the tab icons and the top of the photo grid. Preserve every letter, number, symbol, color and the exact layout from Image 2 — do not retype, rephrase, translate, rearrange or invent any text; do not change any number. Fit the screenshot to the phone's display edge to edge, following the phone's slight tilt. Screen brightness is realistic for a sunlit room — fully legible, not blown out — with a faint, thin reflection of the curtain light across the glass. Amount: a single prop swap plus the new composition. Everything about the puppet, room and light stays identical to Image 1. Camera: iPhone 15 Pro 77mm portrait-mode look, lens at the puppet's eye level, 9:16. Focus plane is locked on the phone screen and the terry fingers holding it — tack-sharp, every character on the screen crisp. Shallow depth of field: the puppet behind is softly out of focus, edges dissolving, still recognizable; the room further back becomes creamy bokeh with soft highlight blobs from the window. Constraints: one puppet, one phone, fully inside the frame, no cropping of the phone, no sneaker, no extra fingers, no second phone or reflection of the phone, no invented UI elements, no altered or extra text, screen content locked to Image 2, puppet locked to Image 1, no CGI smoothness, no watermark.
Tutorial
DENIZ AKKABAK · PUPPET MAGIC TUTORIAL · @DENIZ.AKKABAK
MADE IN INVIDEO · invideo.io/i/DENIZ-ig
The Hat Trick
One selfie becomes a handmade sock puppet who pulls a sneaker, a phone and your own Instagram profile out of an empty top hat — in a single 30-second shot.
A TUTORIAL BY DENIZ AKKABAK · @DENIZ.AKKABAK
PIPELINE NANO BANANA PRO → SEEDANCE 2.5 · FORMAT 30S · 9:16 · ONE SHOT · GENRE PUPPET MAGIC COMEDY
The puppet is not the trick. Anyone can prompt a felt face in sunglasses. The trick is that it is you — same jaw, same half-smile, same Wayfarers — rebuilt from a terry sock and polymer clay, then handed a magic act with eight beats that never break continuity, where the final beat is your own Instagram profile lighting up on a phone screen. The viewer laughs at the sneaker, freezes at the phone and has read your bio before they realise the whole thing was a call to action.
Three generations, three jobs. The first turns a breakfast selfie into an identity-locked puppet portrait. The second swaps the sneaker for a phone and burns a real screenshot onto the screen. The third hands all three images to Seedance 2.5 as numbered references and runs a timecoded magic show in which every object has a hand, an entrance and an exit.
THE PIPELINE AT A GLANCE
- 01
Nano Banana Pro — the puppet portrait
Your selfie goes in as Image 1. The prompt maps the face 1:1 first, then swaps skin for terry cloth and hair for wool roving, and hands him a New Balance 9060. The output becomes the master reference for everything that follows.
- 02
Nano Banana Pro — the phone swap
The puppet portrait as Image 1, a real Instagram screenshot as Image 2. One prop swap — sneaker out, iPhone in, screen locked to the screenshot. The output is both the phone reference and a rehearsal of the final frame.
- 03
Seedance 2.5 in invideo — the show
Three references with three jobs: @Image 1 the puppet, the room and the sneaker; @Image 2 the phone as an object; @Image 3 the screen. Eight stages, 30 seconds, one continuous handheld take, no cuts.
STEP 01 — NANO BANANA PRO
Becoming a Puppet
Most “turn me into a puppet” prompts fail in their first sentence, because they start with the puppet. This one starts with the face. The IDENTITY block comes first and says so in plain words — this is the most important part — then pins proportions, eye line, nose, mouth and jaw and forbids caricature before a single material has been named. The second paragraph writes the face out in terms the model cannot misread: a “closed-lip half-smile, corners lifted a little more on one side”, a “neatly trimmed dark-brown mustache”, curls with “natural volume, not a tight afro and not a dome”.
Only once the face is locked does the prompt say “Now rebuild him”, and from there every feature gets a material — terry sock for skin, speckled polymer clay for the nose, terracotta clay for the lips, clipped wool roving for the ringlets, real plastic Wayfarers scaled down to the head. The 9060, the cable-knit, the travertine table and the monstera read as set dressing here, but they are doing quiet work: they become the room and the prop the video inherits two steps later.
REFERENCE INPUT
Prompt 1
NANO BANANA PRO · IDENTITY-LOCKED PUPPET PORTRAIT IDENTITY — this is the most important part of the prompt. Image 1 is the identity reference. The puppet's face must map 1:1 onto the man in Image 1: same face proportions, same eye line, same nose length and width, same mouth width and position, same jaw. No caricature, no exaggeration of any feature — the only change is the material. Facial specifics from Image 1 to reproduce exactly: a soft oval face with medium-full cheeks and a gently rounded chin; a straight, medium-sized nose with a slightly rounded tip; a closed-lip half-smile, relaxed, corners lifted a little more on one side, no teeth showing; a neatly trimmed dark-brown mustache sitting just above the upper lip; light, slightly patchy dark stubble on the chin and along the jawline, not a full beard; medium-length loose dark-brown curls with relaxed ringlets falling over the forehead and framing both sides of the face — natural volume, not a tight afro and not a dome; black Wayfarer-style sunglasses with a straight top bar and slightly tapered lenses, worn on the nose; a small tattoo on the outer forearm. Now rebuild him as a handmade sock puppet. Do not stylize the photograph — construct the character from real textile materials, keeping the proportions above so that anyone who knows him recognizes him at a glance. Materials: the puppet's head and a modestly proportioned neck are sewn from a single warm peach-beige cotton terry sock, its knit loops and pilling visible, with soft wrinkles where the fabric bunches. Facial features are separate sculpted pieces glued onto the sock, sized true to Image 1: a nose in matte speckled polymer clay with a rough sanded surface, and closed lips in a darker terracotta clay with fine tool scratches and a faint gloss, shaped into his exact half-smile. Hair is his loose dark-brown ringlets recreated in coarse clipped wool roving curled into soft individual loops, a few frizzy stray fibers catching the light; a matching trimmed wool mustache and a light scatter of short stubble fibers glued along the chin and jaw. Real black plastic Wayfarer-style sunglasses, scaled to the puppet, sit on the clay nose. The tattoo is painted onto the sock fabric of the forearm. Outfit: a Kith-style head-to-toe look, as if pulled from the Kith online store, remade in miniature textiles — an oversized cream heavyweight cable-knit crewneck sewn from a real chunky knit with a ribbed collar, and wide-leg pleated stone-colored trousers in miniature wool. A small Kith wordmark embroidered on the chest in thread, kept subtle. Every garment shows real yarn, seams and fabric fuzz. He holds up one New Balance 9060 sneaker toward the camera in a stuffed sock hand with stitched fingers, proudly presenting it: a chunky miniature version in a stylish colorway of sea salt, quartz grey and muted sage, built from real suede scraps, mesh and thick cream laces, the New Balance "N" done as a small fabric appliqué rather than a printed logo. Setting: a stylish, Pinterest-worthy fashion apartment, softly out of focus behind him — a cream bouclé sofa, a travertine coffee table, a chrome arc floor lamp glowing warm, a monstera, a wooden shelf with a few sneakers, afternoon window light from the left. The room is real and full-scale; the puppet is held up in the foreground, filling most of the frame. Camera: a close phone portrait, composed like an iPhone 15 Pro 77mm portrait-mode shot at eye level with the puppet, head facing the camera squarely so the face reads clearly, shallow depth of field, tack-sharp focus on the clay nose, sunglasses and knit fibers, the room dissolving into warm creamy bokeh with soft highlight blobs from the lamp. Warm tungsten and window light mixing, natural HDR look, slight sensor grain in the shadows, no studio polish. Constraints: one puppet, one sneaker in hand, sunglasses on at all times, face proportions locked to Image 1, no caricature, no oversized nose or lips, no teeth showing, no human skin, no CGI or 3D-render smoothness, no plasticine claymation look, real textile and clay materials only, no readable text other than the small Kith and New Balance marks, no logo drift, no watermark.
OUTPUT
IDENTITY AUDIT — SAME FACE, NEW MATERIAL
STEP 02 — NANO BANANA PRO
The Prop Swap
The second generation is an edit, not a new picture, and the prompt is written like one. It opens by assigning roles: Image 1 is the master reference for everything, Image 2 is “screen content reference only”. That single sentence stops the model from borrowing the screenshot’s dark palette or layout into the room. A Lock block then repeats what must not move — terry face, wool hair, cream sweater, the puppeteer’s forearm entering from the lower right, the same daylight — and a Change block describes exactly one change: remove the sneaker, hold an iPhone right up to the lens so that the entire phone, all four corners, fits inside the 9:16 frame with only a thin margin of blurred room around it.
The Screen block is where the value sits. Instead of saying “show the profile”, it lists every UI region on the screenshot — status bar, header, round profile photo, three stat columns, bio lines, link row, highlight pills, dashboard card, three buttons, story circles, tab icons — so the model reproduces rather than retypes. And the Amount line, “a single prop swap plus the new composition”, is the leash. Without it, image editors love to improve the lighting while they are in there.
REFERENCE INPUTS — ATTACH IN THIS ORDER
Prompt 2
NANO BANANA PRO · PROP SWAP + SCREEN LOCK Image 1 is the master reference: the hand puppet, his face, hair, sunglasses, outfit, the puppeteer's hand, the living room, the lighting and the phone-portrait camera style. Reproduce all of it exactly. Image 2 is the screen content reference only: an Instagram profile screenshot. Use it for nothing except what appears on the phone screen. Lock: the puppet exactly as in Image 1 — terry-cloth face, curly wool hair, black Wayfarer sunglasses, needle-felted mustache and stubble, the closed-lip half-smile, cream cable-knit sweater, stuffed terry hands, the puppeteer's forearm entering from the lower right. The same room, the same sunlit daylight, colors and grain. Change: remove the sneaker. The puppet holds a modern iPhone in its stuffed hand and pushes it right up to the camera, screen facing the lens. The phone is very close to the lens and dominates the frame: the entire phone, including all four corners and its edges, fits inside the 9:16 frame with only a thin margin of the blurred room visible around it — nothing of the phone is cropped. It is held nearly straight-on, with a barely perceptible tilt for realism. The puppet's terry fingers wrap around the phone's edges in the foreground. Behind the phone, about an arm's length back, the puppet's head and shoulders are visible in the upper part of the frame, out of focus but clearly readable — the round dark curls, the black sunglasses, the half-smile, the cream sweater — leaning in as if proudly showing off his profile. Screen: the phone displays Image 2 exactly, as a real screenshot shown on a real screen — the dark-mode Instagram profile with its status bar, header, the round profile photo, the name, the three stat columns, the bio lines, the link row, the highlight pills, the professional dashboard card, the three buttons, the story circles, the tab icons and the top of the photo grid. Preserve every letter, number, symbol, color and the exact layout from Image 2 — do not retype, rephrase, translate, rearrange or invent any text; do not change any number. Fit the screenshot to the phone's display edge to edge, following the phone's slight tilt. Screen brightness is realistic for a sunlit room — fully legible, not blown out — with a faint, thin reflection of the curtain light across the glass. Amount: a single prop swap plus the new composition. Everything about the puppet, room and light stays identical to Image 1. Camera: iPhone 15 Pro 77mm portrait-mode look, lens at the puppet's eye level, 9:16. Focus plane is locked on the phone screen and the terry fingers holding it — tack-sharp, every character on the screen crisp. Shallow depth of field: the puppet behind is softly out of focus, edges dissolving, still recognizable; the room further back becomes creamy bokeh with soft highlight blobs from the window. Constraints: one puppet, one phone, fully inside the frame, no cropping of the phone, no sneaker, no extra fingers, no second phone or reflection of the phone, no invented UI elements, no altered or extra text, screen content locked to Image 2, puppet locked to Image 1, no CGI smoothness, no watermark.
OUTPUT
STEP 03 — SEEDANCE 2.5 IN INVIDEO
The Show
Now the two stills and the screenshot become three numbered references, each with one job. @Image 1 gives Seedance the puppet, the room and the sneaker — with the instruction to ignore that the sneaker is already in hand. @Image 2 gives it the phone as an object — size against the puppet hands, rounded frame, one-hand grip — and explicitly not its screen. @Image 3 gives it the screen content for Stage 7 alone. Splitting the phone from its screen is the move that makes the profile readable: the model never has to reconstruct text from a photo of a phone, it copies a clean screenshot.
The performance itself is written as eight timecoded stages, each opening with “Continue.” and closing with an “End state” line. That closing sentence is a hand-off — the next stage begins from a described configuration, not an imagined one. Objects are assigned hands: the hat lives in the left until it becomes a handkerchief; the sneaker and the phone only ever appear in the right. And every vanished object is declared gone — “the handkerchief falls out of frame below and is never seen again.” Seedance cannot make a continuity error about something you have already told it no longer exists.
REFERENCE INPUTS — ATTACH IN THIS ORDER
Prompt 3
SEEDANCE 2.5 · 30S · 9:16 · EIGHT-STAGE MAGIC SHOW
30 seconds / 9:16 vertical / one continuous handheld shot, no cuts / comedic magic-show performance
Photorealistic smartphone footage, bright cream living room, soft daylight from the window on the left, natural color, shallow depth of field, true handheld iPhone feel with breathing sway and small reframes, no smooth gimbal. A real puppet filmed at home, not CGI.
@Image 1 defines the puppet (plush peach terry-cloth skin, dark curly hair, black square sunglasses, drawn-on mustache and goatee, cream cable-knit sweater, grey trousers, plush mitten hands), the room, and the brown suede and cream chunky sneaker used in Stage 4. Ignore that the sneaker is already in hand. @Image 2 defines the black smartphone: size relative to the puppet hands, rounded frame, one-hand grip. Do not inherit its screen content. @Image 3 defines the exact phone screen content for Stage 7: dark-mode social profile page. Reproduce faithfully. Ignore the status bar time.
The subject is one hand puppet, the puppet from @Image 1, seated at the front edge of the travertine coffee table facing camera, eye-level medium shot from hair to trousers. The puppeteer is hidden below frame; only the puppet's two plush hands touch the props. The puppet moves like a real hand puppet: head bobs, shoulder wiggles, quick tilts, proud showman attitude. [Stage 1 — approximately 0 to 4s] Initial state: the puppet holds a black felt top hat upside down in its left hand, open crown up, brim at chest height. A real live budgerigar, sky-blue body, white face, fine black wing barring, perches calmly on the puppet's right shoulder. The puppet gives the camera a confident nod and raises its right hand. End state: hat in left hand, bird on right shoulder, right hand raised. [Stage 2 — approximately 4 to 8s] Continue. The right hand gently cups the budgerigar, lifts it off the shoulder and lowers it into the open hat until it disappears below the brim. The puppet pats the hat once. End state: hat upright in left hand, right hand on the brim, shoulder empty. [Stage 3 — approximately 8 to 11s] Continue. The puppet tips the hat so the open crown faces the camera and fills the lower third of frame. The interior is completely empty: smooth black satin lining, no bird, no feathers. The puppet shrugs and tilts its head. Camera pushes slightly toward the opening. End state: empty hat opening facing camera, in the left hand. [Stage 4 — approximately 11 to 15s] Continue. The puppet turns the hat crown-up, plunges its right hand deep inside past where the bottom should be, then pulls straight up. The sneaker from @Image 1 rises out toe first, full size, laces swinging, clearly larger than the hat opening. The puppet lifts it beside its face, side profile to camera. Camera tilts up to follow. End state: sneaker high in the right hand, hat in the left hand. [Stage 5 — approximately 15 to 19s] Continue. The puppet lowers the sneaker to chest height in its right hand. With the left hand it pinches the edge of the hat brim with two fingers and lifts; as it lifts, the stiff hat instantly softens and collapses into one square black silk handkerchief hanging from its fingers, edges rippling, no hat remains. The puppet drapes the handkerchief fully over the sneaker so the shape is covered. End state: right hand holds a cloth-covered object, left hand holds the top corner of the handkerchief. [Stage 6 — approximately 19 to 23s] Continue. The puppet whips the handkerchief away upward with the left hand. Under it the sneaker is gone; the right hand now holds the black smartphone from @Image 2, screen facing camera, still dark. The handkerchief falls out of frame below and is never seen again. The puppet does a proud shoulder wiggle. Camera gives a small jolt, then steadies. End state: dark phone in right hand at chest height, left hand free. [Stage 7 — approximately 23 to 27s] Continue. The puppet extends the phone toward the lens until it fills most of the frame width; the screen lights up showing the exact profile page from @Image 3, sharp and readable. Camera racks focus to the screen. End state: phone screen dominating frame with the profile displayed. [Stage 8 — approximately 27 to 30s] Continue. The left plush hand enters from above and taps the top edge of the screen once. On that tap the profile vanishes and the screen turns solid black with exactly two lines of clean white centered sans-serif text: the upper line reads Comment and the lower line reads "Prompt" with straight double quotation marks around the word Prompt. No other text, icons or logos. The puppet peeks over the phone and nods. Camera holds steady on this final frame to the end.
<Quiet room tone.> <Budgerigar chirp at the start, a tiny flutter as it enters the hat.> <Felt rustle when the hat tips.> <Soft thud as the sneaker emerges.> <Silk swish on the transformation and the whip-away.> <Phone wake tone at 23s, one soft tap at 27s.> (Playful lo-fi jazz, brushed drums and upright bass, quiet throughout, a cymbal hit on each reveal, clean bass note on the final frame.) No dialogue.
Exactly one puppet, one bird, one hat, one sneaker, one handkerchief, one smartphone. Keep the puppet's face, sunglasses, hair, sweater and trousers identical to @Image 1; the sunglasses never come off. Room, lighting and camera position unchanged. Hat in left hand until it becomes the handkerchief; sneaker and smartphone only in the right hand. Once an object vanishes it does not reappear. The puppeteer stays hidden below frame.
no human hands or arms, no second puppet, no duplicate sneaker or phone, no bird reappearing, no feathers in the hat, no hat after the transformation, no extra text or watermark, no misspelled words, no morphing on the puppet face, no sunglasses removal, no CGI glow or particles, no smooth gimbal, no cuts, no lighting or room change.
THE EIGHT STAGES — CHECKPOINTS
STEP 04
Anatomy — Why the Hat Never Runs Out
Seven decisions in the video prompt carry this shot. Each one is anchored to the line that does the work.
- 01
The contract
FORMAT: 30 seconds / 9:16 vertical / one continuous handheld shot, no cuts / comedic magic-show performance. Duration, aspect, camera discipline and genre in one line. “No cuts” is what forces Seedance to solve every transformation on camera instead of hiding it behind an edit.
- 02
Realism by way of a bad camera
STYLE asks for smartphone footage with “breathing sway and small reframes, no smooth gimbal” and closes with “A real puppet filmed at home, not CGI.” The imperfection is the alibi: a floating gimbal reads as a render, a wobbly iPhone reads as your living room.
- 03
Three references, three jobs
REFERENCES splits the puppet (@Image 1), the phone object (@Image 2) and the screen content (@Image 3) — and each line also says what to ignore: the sneaker already in hand, the screen on the phone still, the status bar time. The waivers matter as much as the assignments.
- 04
Choreography with end states
Every [Stage] block ends with “End state: …”. Stage 4’s “sneaker high in the right hand, hat in the left hand” is exactly where Stage 5 opens. Eight stages become one take because none of them is allowed to start from an assumption.
- 05
Left hand, right hand
CONSISTENCY assigns hands: “Hat in left hand until it becomes the handkerchief; sneaker and smartphone only in the right hand.” A puppet has two hands and Seedance will happily use the wrong one. Naming the hand kills the object-swap flicker.
- 06
Sound as structure
AUDIO tags each reveal — a chirp at the start, felt rustle, soft thud, silk swish, a phone wake tone at 23s, one tap at 27s, a cymbal on every reveal. The timestamps in the sound design double as a second timeline the model has to honour.
- 07
The insurance
NEGATIVE PROMPT lists this genre’s exact failures — “no bird reappearing, no feathers in the hat, no hat after the transformation, no duplicate sneaker or phone”. Every negative mirrors a positive instruction above it. It is not a wish list; it is a checklist of continuity errors refused in advance.
THE RESULT
Output — 30 Seconds, Zero Cuts
Check it against the prompt: the budgie perches, enters the hat and never returns; the hat tilts to show an empty satin interior before the sneaker rises out of it; the hat collapses into silk in the left hand while the sneaker stays in the right; the whip-away reveals a dark phone; the profile lights up and racks into focus; and the final tap replaces it with the two-line card. The sunglasses never come off, the sweater never changes, the puppeteer never appears. That is what a locked reference set plus written end states buys you.
THE MAGIC IS NOT IN THE HAT
Write every object’s exit before you write its entrance.
Swap the sock puppet for a plush mascot, a clay figure or a paper cut-out of yourself; swap the sneaker for whatever you are launching and the phone for whatever you want them to read. The skeleton carries any magic act — one identity-locked still, one prop-swap still, one clean screenshot, eight stages with end states and assigned hands. The hat is just where the story keeps its props.
Seedance 2.5 runs inside invideo. Upload your three stills as @Image 1, 2 and 3, paste the prompt, set 30 seconds and 9:16, and let the puppet do the rest. Start here:
WRITTEN, DIRECTED & PROMPTED BY DENIZ AKKABAK · @DENIZ.AKKABAK