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Same prompt, word for word, in every tool. Credits, retries, queue time and watermarks logged. What we haven’t run is labeled vendor claim, never scored.
Brief T1 — the scare scene: a convenience store at night; the CCTV grid shows one figure too many; she turns around — the store is empty. One generation per tool, zero retries.
The storyteller of the three — held back by a watermark its own plan page claims to remove.
Axes, clockwise from top: story fidelity · native vertical · on-screen text · watermark-free · cost · speed · terms
The clean export — best faces, zero text artifacts, no watermark — paid for in queue time.
Axes, clockwise from top: story fidelity · native vertical · on-screen text · watermark-free · cost · speed · terms*
Fast, clean and commercially frictionless — enter via image-to-video, never ask its text-to-video for vertical.
Axes, clockwise from top: story fidelity · native vertical · on-screen text · watermark-free · cost · speed · terms
The full battery — all six briefs on video, the brief-by-brief evidence table, 21 written verdicts and the per-job rankings: the Sprint A Shootout →
Our ongoing art test series: one identical sci-fi brief, run through every tool we test, published exactly as it comes back. New entries land as they’re produced — and the muse readers keep returning to may grow into a character with a story of her own.
Entry #1 · Flagship — Alien Muse: Vela
Kling 4.0Text-to-video · Oct 23, 2026 · From our test archive
The stardust tear-trails on the blink land — but Vela is pushed into an extreme close-up, and the observatory the brief asked for is gone.
Veo 3.1 QualityText-to-video · Oct 23, 2026 · From our test archive
The full brief, mid-shot and all — observatory, nebula gown, the golden stardust blink. It also added pointed ears the character never had.
Runway Gen-4 TurboImage-to-video · Nov 1, 2026 · From our test archive
Runway’s text-to-video can’t shoot vertical, so this brief went through image-to-video instead: true 720×1280, 25 credits, under a minute, no watermark — animated from a still frame of Veo’s run.
Cold, elegant, sharp-tongued. The last star-chart keeper of the Vega ruins belt, her hair is flowing liquid starlight — and when she blinks, stardust spills from the corners of her eyes. An AI-generated fictional character, created in-house as the anchor every tool has to render.
“Only the lost get to see new stars.”
Same frozen script, three $0 plans — ElevenLabs, Synthesia, HeyGen. One finished clean, one watermarked itself, one hit a 60-second wall.
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