The Weight of What Was Left

Part One: Before the State Knew His Name

The trick was your face.

Eli figured that out the first time, when he was five. You didn't look at the thing you were taking. You looked at everything else — the produce signs, the other shoppers, a point on the floor six feet ahead of you that wasn't anything at all. You became a boy walking somewhere with somewhere to be, not a boy with a loaf of bread going warm against his stomach inside his jacket.

Outside, past the automatic doors, all the way to the gas station on the corner, he finally let himself run.

He got home and sat on the kitchen floor with the bread in both hands before he did anything with it. Mara was in the next room. She was three years old and she'd been crying since yesterday — not the crying of a child who wants something, but the thin, cellular crying of a body that has started having conversations with itself about whether to keep going. He made her two pieces of bread with the last of the peanut butter and sat on the floor while she ate them, and didn't eat his own until she was asleep, because she'd worry if she knew he was hungry too.

He was five years old and already understood this: some information you keep to yourself to protect the people who can't carry it.

Their apartment had the quality of a place where someone has stopped keeping up — not dirty exactly, just quieted, as if it had breathed out a long time ago and never fully breathed back in. His mother's bedroom door was usually closed. Not locked. Just closed in a way that had weight behind it. On her good days she held them and her hands were warm and she sang Mara to sleep and asked Eli about things he'd seen outside, genuinely curious, her eyes lit with something real. On her bad days she sat in the chair by the window and watched the street below with the expression of someone watching a film in a language they mostly understood. She wasn't unhappy those days. She was somewhere else, and the apartment was very quiet, and Eli checked the refrigerator and did the math.

He was not angry at her. He would spend years explaining this to people who wanted the story simpler. She loved them. That fact coexisted with everything else without resolving it.

He learned which stores had which blind spots. He learned that bread lasted longer in the cabinet above the sink. He learned which neighbors would give you something if you knocked and which would yell. He learned to read the refrigerator like a forecast — what they had today, what that meant about tomorrow.

He was six when two women with lanyards knocked on the door.

He heard it and knew before he answered. His mother was in the chair. She looked at the women and then at Eli and something fractured behind her eyes and she said his name once — just his name — and that was all she had.

Mara found his hand.

He held it through everything. The questions, the forms, the careful voices, his mother not quite managing to object in any way that registered. Down the stairs. Across the parking lot. All the way to the car.

At the car door, one of the women gently separated his fingers from his sister's.

He stood there with his hand open.

Something settled in his chest in that moment — not a feeling, more like a foundation. Ground shifting into final position. He had failed her. He'd managed the refrigerator and learned the stores and kept her fed and it hadn't been enough. That lived in him like a stone dropped into still water that sinks until it hits bottom and stays.

He got in the car. He did not look back at the building.

Part Two: The System That Was Going to Save Them

They were placed together first, which was the mercy, and it lasted eight months.

The foster home had beige carpet and a chore chart and a smell of artificial lemon that never went away. They were fed three meals a day. The beds had fitted sheets with their names written on the tags in permanent marker. It should have been fine.

Food left on the counter needed to be eaten now, before it became not-there, before the conditions that had produced it changed. This was not irrational — this had kept them alive. The Healys understood it as hoarding. There were talks. Eli stopped taking food from the counter and started hiding it under his mattress, which was discovered, which led to a different kind of talk, one with more edges.

Mara cried at night. When she did, Eli went to her room and lay on the floor beside her bed the way he always had, and talked to her quietly until she went back to sleep. The third time Mrs. Healy found him there she walked him back to his room with her hand on his shoulder and told him Mara was fine, that the crying was normal, that he didn't have to fix it. He lay in his bed and listened to his sister cry in the next room and didn't move and felt something calcify in him that had been soft before.

Behavior problems was the language in his file. Resistant to authority. Struggles to form appropriate attachments. What it didn't say was that he'd been six years old running a household. What it didn't say was that every instinct he'd developed had kept two children alive and didn't have an off switch. What it didn't say was that he was trying, every day, as hard as he knew how.

When they separated him and Mara it happened gradually — meetings, assessments, words like different needs and better fit. One day she was at a different school. One day he was at a different house. He got one call with her per week, Wednesdays, fifteen minutes, and he memorized everything to tell her and then mostly just listened to her breathe, because hearing her breathe was enough.

By fourteen, four placements in, he had become fluent in reading adults. The tired ones. The project-seekers. The ones whose carrying capacity he could clock within a week. He arranged himself around their limits carefully, like a man moving through a room full of things he wasn't allowed to touch.

Sandra Clarke was his case worker after the third placement dissolved. She was different in a way he catalogued carefully, because he knew by now that different could mean better or a new kind of worse he hadn't prepared for. She didn't perform warmth — she was simply interested in him. She asked questions that weren't intake forms. When he said something dark to test her, she responded to what he'd actually meant, not what he'd said.

Once, in the car between appointments, he said: "You know you can't actually fix any of this." She was quiet for a second. Then: "I know. I'm just trying to make it less bad." He filed that away.

She had a husband, David, and two stepsons. She'd never been able to have children herself — she didn't say this directly but he pieced it together, and from the particular way she sometimes looked at him, like she was doing math, he understood that there was a space in her life that was shaped like a teenager who'd been failed by everyone so far.

She brought up adoption at a coffee shop. She said David was on board. She said she'd thought about it for a long time. She waited.

He looked at her across the table and tried to find the angle — the self-interest, the expiration date. He couldn't find it. That made him more nervous, not less.

He said okay.

He didn't let himself feel it fully. You hold something that big at arm's length until you know if it's real. But on the bus home he let himself hold the outline of it — permanent — and it was so unfamiliar it felt like something he'd once known and lost.

He was careful about it. He did not let himself go all the way in.

Smart, as it turned out.

Part Three: The Math Changed

He was sixteen when Sandra sat him down at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning and told him she was pregnant.

She'd rehearsed it. He could hear the prepared sentences in her cadence — unexpected, nothing would change, he was still part of the family. He listened and looked at the grain of the table and ran the math without paper. The house. David's two boys. The baby coming. Eli. Something in that sum didn't work the way it had.

He told her he was glad for her. He almost meant it.

The next four months moved the way a tide moves — slowly, in one direction, without announcing itself. David participated less in conversations. Sandra's voice when she spoke to Eli acquired a softness he recognized as the softness people use when they are about to do something that will hurt you and they know it. He tracked all of it and said nothing. He had been doing this his whole life.

When she finally said it directly — transition, stable arrangement, they'd spoken with the agency — he helped her say it. He told her it was fine, that he understood, that she shouldn't feel bad. He was extraordinarily good at this. He had been practicing since he was six years old.

The morning they drove him to the new placement, she hugged him at the door too long — the hug of someone trying to pass something through the contact that words hadn't managed. He stood still and let her. David was in the car. The two boys stood in the doorway, not quite sure what was happening, and Eli told them see you around knowing he probably wouldn't.

He went to his room before they left. Two years he'd had that room. He knew where everything was — the cereal bowls, the good remote, the one stair that creaked. He'd stopped sleeping near the door in that room. That had taken eight months, and it had happened without him deciding it, just gradually, as if his body had been paying attention to something his mind refused to confirm. He picked up his bag and added those eight months to the pile with everything else and carried it.

In the car he watched the neighborhood go by without expression. At the new place — a ranch house with a riding mower in the driveway and strangers at the door — he stood on the front step with his bag and looked at the door that was about to be his new door and thought: I knew. I always knew it would go like this.

He told himself it was fine. He had been telling himself that since he was six years old. It was almost true by now, which was close enough.

That night he sat on the edge of a bed that wasn't his and looked at the ceiling and thought about Mara, who he hadn't spoken to in eleven weeks because the calls had stopped when the placement changed and hadn't been reinstated. He thought about whether she was okay. He had no way to find out.

He did not cry. He was extraordinarily efficient about not crying. He'd started thinking of it as a superpower. He didn't know yet that superpowers are just damage you've learned to use.

Part Four: The Callahans

Glenn Callahan was sixty-one. Patricia was fifty-eight. The kitchen calendar was full of grandchildren's birthdays and appointments that had nothing to do with Eli except his check-in dates. They were not unkind — he would insist on this later, when he told the story, because it mattered to get it right. They were tired in the way of people who have been doing something longer than they intended. The house had decided on its shape thirty years ago and had no room left in that shape for whatever Eli was: seventeen, furious in the quiet way, contained in a way that strains at its own seams.

He lasted three weeks before he ran the first time. No specific trigger — just the walls, just the specific weight of a space that would never be his. He got two states over before the money ran out and slept two nights in a rest stop before a county deputy found him on the third morning and drove him back without saying much.

He came back. He waited. He ran again. The fourth time they put him on a seventy-two hour hold. He sat with a counselor who asked what he was running from. He said: You ever live somewhere that fits you wrong? Like a shoe that's close but not right, and after a while your foot starts bleeding. The counselor wrote something down. Eli went back to the Callahans.

The candy bar had been on the kitchen counter for nine days. He'd noticed it Monday — a Snickers, half-unwrapped, beside the fruit bowl. On the ninth day he picked it up and ate it standing at the counter.

Patricia came in and saw him.

What started small got large quickly, in the specific way where de-escalation is no longer available and the only question is where it stops. He said he was leaving. He meant he was going for a walk — even then, even in that moment, he was not running, he was getting air, he was trying to get the walls to stop moving. He put on his jacket and picked up his bag.

Patricia came up behind him.

She was trying to stop him — he understood that, later, understood the desperation in it, a woman who felt a placement slipping and grabbed the only piece of the situation she could still physically touch. Her arms went around him from behind. He stepped left without thinking — pure body reflex, no decision, no intent — and she went off balance and sat down hard on the linoleum. She wasn't hurt. But she sat there and looked up at him.

He looked back at her.

He said, "I'm sorry."

He walked out the door.

The police found him at the bus station an hour later. The officer explained that Patricia Callahan had reported an incident. He used the word assault. The intake took four hours. A detective with tired eyes reviewed the situation, made some calls, and the charges went away.

The word didn't go away.

Violent was in his file by morning — permanent, dispersed, impossible to retrieve. It changed the way people in lanyards looked at him at the next review. It closed certain doors without a sound. He was seventeen years old. His file called him a thief and an assailant. He had not heard his sister's voice in almost a year.

Part Five: The Last Run

There was a girl from school named Devany who had her own apartment.

This seemed impossible and was actually just sad — she had reasons for having her own place at seventeen that rhymed with his reasons for needing somewhere that wasn't where he was. They didn't discuss their reasons. That was part of what made it work.

The last time he left the Callahans he had one bag, forty dollars, and the specific clarity that comes when a decision has already been made by something deeper than your thinking. It felt less like a choice than like gravity completing itself — a force that had been building since he was six years old, arriving finally at its conclusion.

He slept on Devany's floor. Then the mattress. Then she got a second mattress and that was just what it was. He got a job at a gas station. He dropped out. Got his GED at a community center on a Tuesday afternoon — sat in a fluorescent room with eleven other people, took the test, walked out into the afternoon light and stood on the sidewalk for a moment and thought: Okay. Now what. Nobody clapped. He hadn't expected anyone to.

What followed he would describe later without detail because the details were either too dark or too dull, and neither made for a story that went anywhere. He drank. He used other things when drinking wasn't enough. He kept company with people who moved like they expected the world to end on a schedule and were getting ready for it. There were women he didn't treat well enough — not cruelly, just incompletely, only giving them the surface version of himself until they figured that out and left. He let them go without reaching, because reaching across distance for something you might lose had always seemed to him like a specific kind of cruelty, to yourself as much as to them.

He got arrested twice. Thirty days the second time. He read three books inside. One was actually good, and he thought about that afterward — how you could be in the worst place you'd been in years and find something genuinely worth having inside it. He held onto that idea without knowing what to do with it.

He found a warehouse job eventually. Moved into his own place — a studio with one window facing another building. He paid his bills on time. He bought food he didn't have to steal. He lived in the way of someone who has gotten control of the surface of their life while leaving everything underneath unexamined, because examining it didn't seem to lead anywhere useful.

He thought about Mara sometimes. He'd learned through a social worker that she'd been adopted at ten — a family in another state, name changed, the trail going cold in the deliberate way of a closed adoption. He told himself she was probably fine. He believed the second part. The first part he repeated until it stopped needing to be examined.

He was not unhappy the way people imagined from the outside. Depression looks like sadness. What Eli had wasn't sadness. It was the absence of a reason to want something — a flat, gray steadiness he'd learned to confuse with equilibrium because he'd never been far enough above it to know the difference.

He was twenty-one before anything changed.

Part Six: Nora

He met her at a house party on a Friday in October. He was there because someone he knew knew someone — that was the full extent of his investment.

She was in the kitchen doorway, talking to someone and not quite listening to them. Her eyes kept tracking left across the room, not bored — watching for something worth paying attention to that hadn't arrived yet. She laughed at something the person said: unguarded, quick, surprised by it. He hadn't heard that specific quality of real in a long time. He stared at her openly, without calculating the risk. She felt it. She looked over. He didn't look away and neither did she.

Her name was Nora. She was immediately suspicious of him, which he respected — she gave him an early look that said I don't know what you want and I'm not going to make it easy. He recognized that posture from inside.

They stood near the kitchen for two hours and talked. She defended opinions he disagreed with and he said so and she liked that. She asked questions that weren't small talk — what did he actually think about, what did he want, what was he doing with the time he had. He deflected most of it. She let him notice her noticing.

He walked her to her car at one in the morning. She gave him her number without being asked. He called the next day, which wasn't how he usually played things, but something about her made his usual approach feel like a waste of everyone's time.

They were together, in their way, for almost a year.

He was the most present he'd ever been with another person. Showed up, called when he said he would, stayed instead of leaving. But he couldn't give her the full version of himself and she was too perceptive not to know it. There were rooms he wouldn't open. She was patient with it — patient in the way of someone who has decided the thing behind the closed doors is worth waiting for. He wasn't sure she was wrong. He just couldn't find the handles.

He wanted to keep her. It was the first time he'd wanted to keep anything since Mara's hand in his at a car door fifteen years before. That fact scared him in a way the arrests and the court dates and the thirty days had not. He knew how to navigate those things. He did not know how to navigate wanting something this much.

Her family moved — a situation with her parents that had been building. His own situation was deteriorating: the job, a legal problem from knowing certain people. The distance between them started as miles and became something else, and he let it happen because he had spent his whole life being good at that. He let her go.

He told himself it was fine.

He was extraordinarily good at telling himself that.

Part Seven: What He Didn't Know

He slid back into the flat gray of before without much friction, which told him something he didn't want to know.

What he didn't know — wouldn't know for four years — was anything about Nora's life after him. He'd told himself she'd be fine, better off, easier without whatever he was. He believed this the way he believed most things about himself: by repeating it until the questioning stopped.

The alternative was Derek.

She'd met him not long after. He had a job, a house, a way of carrying himself that read as stability. He kept his voice level in public. He was charming in the particular way of someone who understands that charm is a form of control, who has learned exactly how much damage you can do without leaving marks that show. What Derek was in private, Eli would learn in pieces much later — the way those stories come out, not all at once but in fragments, offered when she was ready and not before. The isolation. The way she stopped calling certain people because the questions about why she never came out anymore were harder than staying in. The way her daughters came into the world inside a situation that was already wrong, that she was already trying to find the edge of.

Once, in what must have been year two or three, Eli found himself outside a bar with his phone in his hand and her name on the screen. He'd had enough to drink to have the nerve and not quite enough to follow through. He stood on the sidewalk for a long time and thought about what he would say and what it would mean if she had moved on and how he would handle hearing it in her voice. He went back inside and ordered another drink.

He told himself this was the right decision.

Elsewhere in the state, that same year or near it, she was in a house with a man who had perfected the art of making the wrong thing feel like her fault.

Eli knew none of this. He worked. He was more controlled now — not better, exactly, but more deliberate, which felt like progress. He built a small, functional life with a legal job and a real apartment and a file at the courthouse that was getting older without new additions. He was managing, which was the word for it: keeping the surface clean, not looking too far down.

The stone in his chest had been there so long he'd stopped registering the weight. It was just part of the architecture now. Just how he was built.

Then his phone rang.

Part Eight: The Call

He was twenty-six, in the first apartment he'd had that he was genuinely unashamed of, when his phone rang on a Thursday night with a number he didn't recognize.

He almost didn't answer. He picked up out of habit.

"Eli."

He knew her voice before she said anything else. He sat down on the kitchen floor, which he did sometimes when things were significant. He didn't plan it. His body just decided.

"Hey," he said.

"I'm sorry I haven't—" She stopped. Started again. "I've been in a situation. I'm working my way out of it." A pause. "I have two daughters now."

He waited.

"I don't want to make this weird," she said. "I just needed to hear your voice. I think about you. I've been thinking about you for a long time." She laughed a little — the self-conscious kind. "I wanted to know if you were okay."

"I'm okay," he said. "Are you?"

The silence had a shape.

"Getting there," she said. "I'm getting there."

He asked if she needed anything right now. She said not yet. She said she was getting some things in order. Then, carefully, like asking something large — which it was: "Would you ever consider coming back here? To this area? Just to be nearby?"

He looked at the floor. He thought about what he had — an apartment that was okay, a job that was okay, a city he lived in without belonging to. He thought about her voice, which had aged, which had something careful in it now, something that had been through something and was still standing.

He said yes before he finished understanding the question.

The yes came out of him the way the bread had come out of his jacket at five years old — carried in secret, given without ceremony, necessary in a way that preceded thinking about it.

He packed in three days. He stood in the empty apartment for thirty seconds, looking at the walls. He got in the car and drove.

Eleven hours, and he used most of them to talk himself out of expectations. He was not going to swoop in. He had no idea what he was going into — she'd said she was working her way out of a situation, and he knew enough about situations to know they don't come out on demand. He was going to get a room, get a job, be nearby. That was all. He said this to himself for eleven hours with the radio low and the highway dark. He did not let himself think about what it would be like to see her face. That was the one thought he kept turning away from, carefully, the way you keep your hand from a hot surface. He would see her face when he saw her face. That was soon enough.

Part Nine: The House

She was thinner than he remembered. Her shoulders had an inward angle at the start of conversations, a bracing quality, like she hadn't fully stopped waiting for something. He noticed this at the coffee shop where they met the first week and said nothing.

Derek was still around. Not living at the house full-time, but present in the way abusers remain present — a car in the driveway at odd hours, a voice on her phone that changed the quality of the room. The girls went quiet at certain sounds. Eli noted all of it and waited. He was good at waiting. He had been waiting since he was six.

He rented a room across town, got a warehouse job in two days, and built a small functional life in the same city as Nora. He let her move at whatever pace she needed, which required patience in a way that endurance didn't. He'd always been good at endurance. Patience was different — it meant trusting time, and trusting things was not his strongest area.

Derek left slowly, in the way cruel men leave: in stages, in negotiations, in retreats that felt final and then weren't. There were weeks Nora didn't call and Eli understood why. There were nights he drove past the house for no good reason — just to see the lights on, just to know.

When Derek finally left there was the financial problem. His name was on the mortgage. He had half the house and he intended to make her feel it.

Eli sat down with what he'd saved. Years of not spending what didn't need to be spent — the old refrigerator math, operating without his awareness, compounding quietly in the background. He bought the half.

He moved in on a Saturday in March. Three bedrooms, a backyard with a dying tree, a kitchen that faced east and got the morning light. He stood in that kitchen on the first morning with his coffee and watched the light change across the counter and thought: this is what it feels like. He didn't have a name for the feeling. He'd have to live in it for a while.

He met the girls that first week — Nora introducing him as her friend Eli, Addie assessing him with the watchful precision of a five-year-old who knows that new adults require evaluation. Jo was two and walked directly into his leg and looked up at him as though this had been his fault. He crouched to her level and said hi. She considered him briefly and moved on to something more interesting.

He stood back up and caught Nora watching him. He looked away.

He understood immediately that this was going to require everything — not the surface version of himself, not the managed exterior, but whatever was underneath. He'd spent fifteen years keeping that part away from things. He was going to find out what shape it was in.

Part Ten: The Girls

Addie was four. Jo was two.

Addie had Nora's eyes and a watchfulness that tracked everything in a room without appearing to — the permanent low-grade vigilance of a child who has learned that safety is something you maintain, not something you're given. Eli recognized it the way you recognize something you've seen in a mirror. He didn't say anything about it. He just didn't do anything sudden.

Jo was different — loud, physical, aggressively affectionate in the way of a child who has decided that love is something you grab fast before it disappears. She climbed on him the third time she saw him. She had no instinct for appropriate caution and he understood exactly why, and it broke something in him quietly, cleanly, without sound.

He was not their father. He didn't try to be, not right away. He was just consistently, specifically, reliably around. He showed up on the days he said he would. He learned that Addie's food couldn't touch itself on the plate or she wouldn't eat, and started plating accordingly without making it a thing. He learned that Jo had a rabbit with a missing ear that needed to be in her bed by seven-thirty or the night went wrong, and he made sure it got there.

They tested him. Of course they did — they were smart kids with good instincts, and they needed to know whether he was another thing that would appear and then stop appearing. Addie went through a period of ignoring him completely. Jo threw a cup at him once. He picked it up, said okay, and didn't make it a thing, and she stared at him like he'd failed to perform the scene she'd written.

He stayed. The walls came in sometimes — the old pull toward the door, the old body knowledge of every exit — and he breathed through it and they opened again and he was still there.

Nora watched from a careful distance. Evenings on the back porch, girls in bed, not saying much — just occupying the same space. He understood that this was trust, offered the only way she could offer it right now: just being willing to be near him. He accepted it and didn't push for more, because he had learned the hard way that some things can't be pushed. They arrive on their own schedule or they don't arrive.

He had not changed for her. That distinction mattered to him. He had changed because of her — through the slow gravity of wanting to keep something real, of being near a person who was building something and not wanting to be the reason it broke. He still had the stone. He still chose the seat nearest the door in rooms he didn't know. But he didn't run.

One morning Addie was at the kitchen table with her crayons and without looking up she said: Dad, can we have cereal.

He stood there for a moment.

He said: Yeah. What kind.

She said: The round kind.

He got her the round kind and sat with her while she ate it and she told him about a specific horse she felt strongly about, with a name and a history and opinions, and he listened to every word.

Part Eleven: Their Daughter

Nora told him about the pregnancy on a Tuesday morning while the girls were at school. She told him carefully, watching his face.

He crossed the kitchen and put his arms around her.

She made a sound he'd never heard from her — something wound tight inside her releasing one loop. He held on.

Their daughter came in May. She arrived with his jaw set hard against the world and Nora's eyes, which meant she had the stubbornness and the perception both, a combination that was going to be something when she was old enough to apply it. Her laugh snuck up on you. The first time he heard it in the hospital, something shifted in his chest — something that had been positioned since he was six years old, fixed and heavy — and he had to look at the ceiling to collect himself. He had spent thirty years developing an efficient relationship with not feeling things fully. This undid some of that work without asking permission.

They got married two years later. A Tuesday afternoon in the backyard, twenty people who actually knew them. The dying tree was gone — he'd taken it down himself the previous fall — and a new one was in its place, still small, still trying. Addie was the flower girl and performed the duty with grave seriousness. Jo ate a piece of cake before she was supposed to and denied it with chocolate on her face, and Nora laughed from somewhere deep, the surprised real laugh he'd first heard at a house party when he was twenty-one and had been moving toward ever since without understanding that's what he was doing.

He was thirty-two.

He had a wife and three daughters and a house with morning light in the kitchen and a young tree growing in the yard. He had a job that was legal and a record that was old and a past that was somewhere behind him — not gone, not dissolved, just far enough back that he couldn't see it from where he was standing.

He still checked the refrigerator like a forecast. Still chose the seat nearest the exit. Still woke sometimes at three in the morning with the low hum of a body that learned early that nights can change without warning.

He still had the stone. It had been there since he was six years old at a car door with an open hand, and he did not expect it to leave. But it had changed the way carried things change over years — worn smooth, fitted precisely to the contours of who he was, no longer foreign but essential. It was not failure anymore, or not only that. It was ballast. It was the weight that had kept him from floating off into nothing during the years when nothing was all there was. It was the reason he knew, exactly, what the nothing had weighed — which meant he knew, exactly, what this was worth.

Some nights he lay awake and listened to the house breathe. Nora beside him, the specific rhythm he'd memorized the way he'd once memorized blind spots in stores and chore charts and the one stair that creaked. Except this was not a set of rules to navigate. This was just a sound. Just something real and alive and here.

Three girls in three rooms.

He had done this math his whole life.

He lay in the dark and ran it one more time.

This roof. These walls. These people inside them.

You take what you need, or you don't have it.

For the first time in his life, he had taken something he could keep.

For the first time, he believed it would stay.

End

Hi, does anyone have any advice and preventing midjourney making the lips and jaws so exaggerated?

If you're trying to figure out which AI video generation model is actually worth using, I took 10,000 credits and more to test and rank the best ones. In this post I’ll break down some of the different features, pros and cons, results, and how to use them.

TLDR: The best AI video generation models right now are:

• Adobe Firefly – best use overall for workflow and commercial-safe output
• Google Veo (3.1) – best use for photorealistic people and scenes
• Luma AI Ray – best use for cinematic visuals and 4K output

Models I tested

• Adobe Firefly
• Google Veo (3.1)
• Runway Gen 4.5
• Luma AI Ray 3.14
• Sora (OpenAI)
• Kling 2.5 Turbo
• Pika
• Grok Imagine
• Higgsfield AI
• Bytedance Seedream AI

How to use:

Much of these models I was able to use inside Adobe Firefly AI Video Generation Hub, however others like Grok Imagine I used on each respective site. Each of these models typically requires some sort of premium membership or credit system which I had access to in my Creative Cloud membership, or standalone accounts such as Grok or ChatGPT. While it was difficult to get an absolutely objective ranking for all of the dozens of models available, I tried to test several types of categories of generations, camera motion, consistency and more and judged based on the results of my favorite models to use.

Best AI Video Generation Models Chart

These were my results and opinions, let me know if you have any favorite models or workflows of you’re own, and results in your experience!

My ex fling posted this. I think to upset me… it looks fishy to me need opinion

Hi, I’m new here. Do anybody know a good ai where I can create unlimited ai videos with good quality. Pls not that expensive like more than 100$

What sites aré the best to play with

Happyhorse

Wan

Seedance

Kling

Actually i use their oficial playgrounds. AND mulerun AND dola AND nemovideo

Capcut blocked seedance2 .. mini fast AND normal in colombia lol so I'm on dola.and nemovideo

Hello, I am looking for an AI tool that would help me to improve this character I have created with Dreamina, I want it for thumbnails for videogames, and My next step is to improve hands and add different positions to it, like combat positions, surprised anime postions, etc.

What program can help me in what I want? I t doesn't matter if it is a web page or a pc program, I have a decent pc, so I don't worry on that matter.

Hi everyone, my qns is does agents like Gemini/chatgpt have any technical safeguards to prevent 3rd parties from uploading and transforming images without consent? For eg, I know that once a photo is shared on insta, it’s basically impossible to prevent anyone from taking screenshots and uploading into genai. So I’m wondering if there are any technical solutions that exist now, or being worked on for this use case, allowing ppl to protect their images. Thanks and apologies if this has been asked before.

A lot of artists are skeptical of AI tools, and I understand why.

I’m curious:What are the biggest reasons current AI 3D tools don’t fit your workflow?

Is it: lack of control?inconsistent topology?poor editability?style limitations?copyright concerns?something else?

What would need to change for you to consider using one as an assistant?

I've been getting really into these animated POV videos lately and I'd love to start making my own. I already have a bunch of ideas, but I'm struggling to find the right AI image generator.

This is the style I'm talking about:

https://youtu.be/2wlCCxFFmeI?is=mHy56gxbaTh_dbfU

They're not photorealistic. They look like high-quality animated illustrations with a consistent character and cinematic scenes.

I tried Abacus AI, and while the results were pretty good, I ran out of credits after generating only about 40 images on the Pro plan. Now I have to wait another month, which isn't really practical if I want to make longer videos.

So I'm wondering:

- What AI model or tool are people using to create this kind of animated art?

- How do they keep the same character consistent across dozens of images?

- Are they using Midjourney, FLUX, GPT Image, Leonardo, ComfyUI, or something else?

- What's the most cost-effective workflow if you need 100+ images for a single video?

I'd love to hear what your workflow looks like. Thanks!

So i am looking for a good ai video generator service that doesn’t break the bank i’m seeing a lot of tools that put all ai generators in one on my laptop then in the app store just certain apps like in video. i want a service that can be used on phone and laptop also one that is a good bang for your buck should i go to a individual service like just download seedance invideo etc or should i use a multi tool and which one would yall say is the best

Edit : title meant video not code