Jimeng Launches Short Drama Studio, Self-Developed Script Model DreamScript Supports Full-Process Short Drama Production

About three years ago, we hand-crafted our first AI short film, "I Am a Wa Mao," using Jimeng.

When we released it, the response was pretty good, and Jimeng counts as one of the first tools I used to get into AI video.

But recently, while scrolling through AI short dramas on Douyin at high intensity, I've noticed the visuals are getting more and more impressive, but the moment a character opens their mouth, I can literally curl my toes through the floor... It's all those extremely classic AI-generated lines, like "I'm not compromising, I'm giving you one last shred of dignity," or "This isn't just a betrayal, it's a trial of the soul."

Come on, man, who actually talks like that when real people argue???

Every time I scroll past lines that are obviously straight out of a large model, I swipe away within three seconds max. On the flip side, looking at the hit AI short dramas that have recently racked up millions of likes on Douyin, you'll find the creators put tremendous effort into the scripts, deliberately washing out that AI preachy tone and stuffing in a lot of their own ideas, so it's comfortable to watch and doesn't make you cringe.

Then these past couple of days, I discovered Jimeng just dropped a big update: the Jimeng Short Drama Studio.

I went in and poked around, and found they did something really bold this time—they gathered thousands of proven hit short dramas from across the internet and specifically trained a script model for writing short dramas, called DreamScript.

In plain terms, they first gave the AI a screenwriter's brain that understands short dramas and the tropes that make them satisfying, so it stops writing like an elementary school essay.

Of course, just hearing me talk is useless, so let's get to work!

Since AI American high school dramas are really hot right now, I wanted to put a new twist on the American high school romance drama foundation and make a short drama too, with each episode around a minute and a half. The premise is an ordinary Northeastern girl studying abroad at an American high school who accidentally swaps souls with a pure-blooded, cold and aloof vampire school idol who's been alive for three hundred years.

The finished product looks like this!

I gotta say, it's a bit hilarious—the funniest part is that the female lead normally switches back and forth between Northeastern dialect and English, and after the two swap souls, this vampire school idol with a 188cm Western abstinence-style handsome face opens his mouth and starts spouting Northeastern dialect at full tilt, hahahaha.

Actually, before running the whole process, I did a same-prompt comparison test with this premise. On the left, I threw it to a general-purpose large model I usually use, and on the right, I threw it to DreamScript in the Jimeng Short Drama Studio, letting each write the first episode. Take a look at the comparison yourselves.

The feel of the two outputs is actually quite different. But subjectively, I prefer the direction Jimeng gave—it's more restrained and more immersive.

English text is being prepared.

But the version written by Jimeng's self-developed DreamScript model below is different. As ByteDance's first script model, the drama it writes has a screenwriter's awareness.

Jimeng's version puts the conflict at night: Lin Da'e sneaks out to retrieve her confiscated skateboard, while Damon is on a mysterious night walk, and the two collide because they touch the family silver jewelry, which triggers the swap—the cause-and-effect setup is fairly solid.

The ordinary large model's logic is boring: male and female leads collide → souls swap → wake up and realize something's wrong. The logic is fine but too conventional—I can guess what comes next from the opening.

DreamScript's version clearly has layered progression.

Step one is establishing each character's state in this scene: Lin Da'e sneaking off to get her skateboard with a bit of a reckless attitude, while Damon is on a night walk avoiding watchful eyes—the motivations are established first. Step two is creating a reasonable chance encounter: both are preoccupied and not paying much attention to their surroundings, so they collide in the same blind corner. Step three is the climax of the plot—the mismatched contrast—maxing out the comedic contrast of the aloof young master with blond hair and blue eyes suddenly spouting Northeastern dialect.

More importantly, it sets up a great breakpoint at the end of the first episode, stopping right when Lin Da'e, with that handsome black-haired, blue-eyed face, opens her mouth in the restroom and immediately speaks Northeastern dialect, freezing on the spot. It leaves the biggest contrast suspense and punchline right at the end, which makes me want to keep watching.

So with that said, let's now look at the whole Jimeng Short Drama Studio process for completing a short drama.

At the script stage, besides the self-developed DreamScript model, you can also call on 6 large text models at any time and switch between them. If you already have a written web novel, it supports throwing in up to 100,000 characters at once and automatically breaking it down into a 100-episode short drama outline and episode breakdown—friends with long manuscripts or novel adaptations don't need to manually move things chapter by chapter.

Moreover, for common short drama genres like fantasy/xianxia, urban romance, and apocalypse rules, it directly includes several corresponding genre style Skills, letting you one-click preset the style so the plot direction better fits the script's genre.

After you throw in the story premise, there's also a topic selection menu. It breaks down things like audience, story background, character setup, and core relationships, and you can click in to see specific options. When you have inspiration but don't know how to describe it, these options can clarify the requirements.

Once all these preset parameters are selected, you can start generating the script. In the first stage, Jimeng doesn't immediately write all the dialogue for the male and female leads; instead, it first gives a story synopsis. What's useful here is that it attaches specific troubles after the soul swap—like dealing with suitors while wearing the school idol's face, dodging garlic, and facing the vampire family. This contrast gag starts to have plot that can keep playing out.

Next is the character bio.

The character bio writes out the changes in expressions, language, and relationship between the two before and after the swap. Honestly, I don't know if you all usually read novels. Having read a ton of novels, I think this character bio is really spot-on—the lonely stranger in a foreign land, the numb and world-weary immortal, and the absolute core relationship where the two are each other's only one—all of that feeling is written out.

On the same page you can view the settings, and on the right you can keep making adjustment requests, then below choose to generate an outline or the main text. For me, I'd rather confirm the character setup here first, to avoid the pain of writing dozens of scenes and then discovering the two characters' settings have problems and having to overturn and redo everything.

Then comes the episode outline.

It's what we just saw: episode one goes from cultural conflict on campus to the blood moon collision and the discovery of the swap, ending on the school idol looking in the mirror and speaking in a Northeastern accent; episode two forces the two into an alliance, then throws out the dinner party. The tasks of these two episodes are divided fairly clearly—after the contrast appears, both leads have things to do afterward, so you won't get those tool characters who just run out to gross you out and then have no scenes later.

Notice that in the outline it also separately marks conflict, expectation points, and the ending hook. These tags let us judge what change actually happens in this episode, and on what basis the ending makes people want to click the next episode.

Then you can enter the full script, and I recorded a segment too. In the script generated here, the text in the main body can be edited manually directly. Whichever sentence doesn't flow, whichever word doesn't sound like something this character would say, we can change it ourselves; for bigger adjustments, we can also keep chatting with the assistant on the right.

But I think, for ordinary people who haven't professionally studied scriptwriting, they probably can't tell at a glance what problems currently exist in the script. So Jimeng has a new feature here that I really like, called Script Doctor. It can help us directly diagnose what problems exist in the script that's already been written, whether it's usable, and give it a score.

It lists the must-fix and suggested-fix points, such as the foreshadowing from the episode two dinner party not being paid off, and the principal suddenly appearing at the vampire manor in episode ten—both of these are places where viewers would really feel something is off.

Then it also outputs a complete script diagnosis report for us,

The overall conclusion acknowledges the opening's character setup and contrast, while listing the main plot's causality and the lack of big payoff moments in episodes four to six as weaknesses. This page pins the problems down to specific episodes and events—the dinner party promise in episode two, the blood moon timeline continuity from episode seven to episode nine, the principal's appearance in episode ten. All are tied to specific episodes and specific problems. It lets me very clearly get where the plot logic of the current script has gone wrong, and specifically how I should go about fixing it.

I think the most important role of this feature is that it can give an overview of the whole thing, helping us sort out in advance all the pits buried across all episodes, or whether the plot we want to advance is reasonable. Because we also know that as long as there's one hole in the plot, all the later plot will change accordingly, and may even become unreasonable. So I think this feature is really necessary—it hits my pain point exactly.

After I have this doctor help me revise the script one by one, I can go straight into video generation.

I really love what Jimeng says here: Good luck with the shoot!

It really has a full sense of ceremony, making me feel like I'm running a one-person film crew, controlling each role in the crew to complete their respective tasks.

OK, once the script stage is passed, let's look further down at how it connects to production.

The most annoying step used to be extracting characters and scenes one by one from the script. Jimeng's short drama studio can batch-split each episode's characters and scenes into assets, then view them together in the asset library.

Based on the plot, Jimeng first broke out the plot assets of the first two episodes. In the asset library you can see 7 characters and 8 scenes. When making the leads' looks, I used AnyCook. What this story needs isn't just two portrait photos of a man and a woman—it also has to distinguish before and after the swap, school uniforms and home clothes, and other different states. On the canvas you can see the same character in different looks in a row, and the prompt corresponding to each image can also be opened and viewed, down to the clothes, skin tone, expression, and accessories. Wherever it doesn't meet the requirements, you can directly edit the prompt manually and continue generating.

You can also do character design directly below, setting up the character you want like sculpting a face—every detail from skin tone to facial features can be adjusted.

If you don't want to make characters from scratch, it also provides 7000+ AI actors and 100+ art styles, so you can first find a direction close to your own story, then adjust expression, makeup, skin, and hairstyle.

By the way, the assets here are connected across the whole pipeline. If midway you feel the lead's clothes aren't suitable, change it once, and all the later shots using this character will automatically change accordingly; if you change it wrong, you can also revert to a historical version with one click.

If several people team up to make a drama, its team version supports up to 20 people working together in one project to revise the script and adjust storyboards, and credits can also be pooled together and shared, with who spent how much crystal clear—no need to pull a spreadsheet to reconcile accounts after every session.

Then we can move on to the episode videos,

If there are 10 episodes in total, they'll all be listed in the same project. Episode one already has characters and scenes, and the later episodes are still to be generated. You can tell at a glance which episode has progressed to which step, and of course you can also generate in batches.

There's one more step here: choosing how to plan the script. When generating the script, there's a small detail to watch out for—the system will ask you to choose whether a single clip has a 15-second or 30-second cap. Once you choose, this setting is locked and can't be changed, so I recommend thinking it through in advance.

In the actual storyboard, the length of each shot can still be adjusted individually—2 seconds, 5 seconds, 10 seconds are all fine. For example, the protagonist's dialogue can be given more time, while a reaction shot cutting to the other person's shocked face only needs two or three seconds; there's no need to rigidly stretch everything to the same length.

Also, the character assets in the storyboard become clickable tags—one click lets you pick which look is actually used in this scene. For a body-swap drama like ours, the same Lin Da'e—should she have the body of a female high school student in this scene, or the face of the vampire school heartthrob? You just click the corresponding character design directly in the storyboard, and it won't get mixed up.

And on the right side there's also a storyboard assistant that can help us modify all kinds of details in the storyboard. If you don't know how to modify things manually, you can just talk to it to make the changes. It's equipped with many different types of skills—for example, I really like using its storyboard scoring skill. Just like the script doctor earlier, it can genuinely help me identify the specific problems in the storyboard for the current scene, and then help me revise them.

Next comes the credits issue that I care about a lot.

What used to hurt the most was going straight to HD video without thinking things through, only to find out after the run that the camera position, action, or continuity was wrong, and then having to do another round. Jimeng lets you first generate with the 480P sample mode, and after confirming the visuals are suitable, upgrade the quality—this approach really saves credits.

For complex blocking, you can also use the short drama director's console to arrange sets, character positions, and camera angles. It has built-in props, actions, and an image-to-white-model feature; those who normally use Blender can also import white models as video references via a plugin. The operation of Jimeng's director's console is basically similar to what we discussed earlier with Xiaoyunque.

Finally, there's the post-production in the storyboard. Basically, simple post-production can all be done in Jimeng's short drama studio—multi-track editing, clip reshoots, audio separation, and dubbing can all be finished directly within the project.

After running the first episode today, what struck me most were actually the two hard flaws the script doctor caught.

A vampire speaking Northeastern dialect—this idea is fun to come up with, but whether the big banquet promise drawn in episode two gets fulfilled later, and whether the story can be brought full circle after ten episodes, is what really determines whether it can actually be sustained.

Three years ago, when making "I Am a Wa Cat," we spent a huge amount of energy wrestling with a single image, a single action, a single shot. Now I'd rather put my time into whether AI characters can speak with more human feeling, and after a scene is over, what exactly has advanced in the relationship between the two characters.

Tools that can help me lay these problems out in advance—I think those are worth the effort.

By the way, Jimeng has also opened up the original creation canvases for hit works like "The Accident," "Land of Contrast," and "Zombie Scavenger." Those who want to learn the production approach can go copy the homework.

Next, I'm off to make episode three of my Northeastern vampire!

Maybe in a while you'll see it on Douyin.

Don't worry, the lines have been verified by a genuine Northeasterner.