The Hexcoded blog

Learn to make it.

Model guides, prompt libraries and production workflows for creative teams making short drama, trailers and narrative video.

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Prompts
The negative prompt set, and why you shouldn't rewrite it

Five exclusions, appended unchanged to every shot. The discipline isn't choosing them well — it's not improving them on shot four.

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Prompts
Five prompt fields, five different things they want

The same sentence that works in Create will produce jitter in Motion and a wrong edit in Edit. Each field expects a different kind of writing.

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Models
Sora's API dies 24 September. Two days to export.

The API sunsets on 24 September and account data goes with it. Files you've already exported are safe. Everything else isn't.

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Prompts
Placing an emotional beat at an exact word

An adjective in a prompt colours the whole clip. An inline trigger lands on one syllable. For a sixty-second cap, that difference buys back seconds.

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Elements
An AI actress did the press round this week

Tilly Norwood sat for interviews on network television and was asked whether AI actors should be Oscar-eligible. The question nobody asked is the interesting one.

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Prompts
Stop repeating your character description in every prompt

The standard advice says paste the same description into every shot. That works until you have a reference system, at which point it's the thing breaking your continuity.

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Prompts
What to write in an Extend prompt

Restate your subject descriptors identically. Not better, not shorter, not improved — identically. Improving the phrasing is what breaks the chain.

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Production
The OpenAI movie premieres this month, and still has no distributor

Luca Guadagnino made a film about Sam Altman for Amazon MGM. It world-premieres at the New York Film Festival. Where it goes after that is unclear.

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Models
Seedance 2.5 was announced with native 4K. Check before you promise it.

ByteDance announced 4K, thirty seconds and fifty references in June. Two of those three arrived. Guess which one didn't.

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Production
A24 took $75 million from Google, and its audience revolted

Not an IP deal, not a training deal, no obligation to put a generated frame on screen. The reaction happened anyway, and that's the part worth reading.

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Models
Veo 3.1 vs Fast vs Lite

Fast gives up nothing. Lite gives up references entirely. The naming points the wrong way about which costs you more.

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Models
Which models produce vertical 9:16 natively

Seventeen of eighteen offer 9:16, and every one of them defaults to it. The interesting question is what else they give you.

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