The Little Match Girl in 105 Seconds: Story Plan, 3D Blockout and Reference-to-Video
Developer crapthings shows how he made a 105-second adaptation of The Little Match Girl by designing the film before generating it: seven chapters, a world guide, a 3D blockout and 23 reference images. Each 15-second blockout chapter then guided MiniMax H3 reference-to-video in ComfyUI on a rented GPU, and a side-by-side comparison shows which directing decisions survived.
Key points
- Split the story into chapters and write a visual world guide plus an inventory of characters, environments and props
- Block out every scene in 3D for framing, camera movement and spatial continuity, and expect several passes
- Build a reference library: 5 character turnarounds, 10 empty environments and 8 key props on white backgrounds
- Export each chapter as a silent 15-second blockout video and use it as the motion and composition reference
- Generate and review one chapter at a time, then play blockout and result in sync to spot drift in angles and cut timing
- He let Codex design the shots in three prompting rounds; the last one simply asked for more varied camera angles