Thirteen takes in a row trying to get the camera to hold still. I asked for it every way I could think of: locked on a tripod, fixed shot, no movement. I even put it in the list of forbidden things.
The camera moved all thirteen times.
Along the way I learned that naming the movement in the prohibitions provokes it. So I took the words “movement” and “zoom” out of there and described in the positive which part of the background didn’t change. Then it held still.
But that wasn’t the real fix, since the real fix wasn’t in the text.
You hand it the ending, you don’t explain it
The tool accepts two frames, the first and the last. I was only using the first one. Everything else I fought with words.
I gave it the last frame too, and the first take with both ends held its framing.
The final frame doesn’t have to be shot. It’s built with the image model from the same real photo, changing only the state: same table, same light, same framing, and the ship already sunk instead of afloat. That costs cents. A video costs between forty and eighty.
I measured it across three shots that same day. With the final frame in place, the reviewer stopped citing the camera and the background, which had been the reason for the thirteen reds. What was left were faults of action, with the ship doing something other than what was asked, and objects that shouldn’t be in the shot.
What I learned about asking for things
There’s small print worth knowing. Interpolating between two frames requires eight seconds and 720p, so you can’t shorten the clip to save money. And the final photo overrules the text: if the ship is turned in it, the clip copies that even if the text asks for something else.
That last part is what I take away. I spent thirteen takes arguing with a machine in a language it interprets and I don’t control, when what I should have done was show it the result. An adjective is open to interpretation. A frame isn’t.
The same thing has happened to me with people across twenty years of shift work, however odd it sounds to say so in a production report. The instructions that worked worst were the ones describing in detail how something had to end up. The ones that worked showed the final state and left the route open.