Look Mom no Hands

 Maya playblast of a pretty terrible animation 😉Seedance 2.0.

The Monkey Who Surfed the Highway

18. Okt. 2026 · @christoph nacken garcia

A scene that wouldn't leave me alone

There's one image I've carried around in my head for a long time.

A monkey stands on a highway bridge. We see him from behind. A truck comes thundering along underneath, and the monkey jumps. He lands on the roof of the truck, plants his feet like it's a surfboard, and rides it down the highway, pretending to surf.

That's it. A simple, slightly absurd idea. I just wanted to see it.

My personal stress test

Seeing it turned out to be the hard part.

I built a reference myself: a 3D monkey model, animated very roughly, jumping from the bridge onto the truck. Nothing pretty, just the camera, the angle and the movement I had in mind. The idea was to hand that clip to an AI video tool as a guide and let it turn my rough blocking into a real shot.

I tried it with Kling. With Runway. With Vidu. Basically with every tool that let me attach a video clip. And I tried it more times than I can count.

It never worked. Worse than that, some of the most horrible things I've ever generated came out of this one scene. The tools just didn't get it. They didn't understand that the camera stays behind the monkey as he jumps. Suddenly the camera would swing around, or the monkey would face us, or he'd be filmed from some completely different side. Whatever came out, it never looked like what I wanted, and never like my reference.

At some point this scene became my stress test. Whenever a new tool came along, the monkey had to jump.

Then came Seedance

When I first got my hands on Seedance 2, of course the monkey went in again. Same famous, badly animated reference clip.

This time I added one more thing: a reference image that looked like the first frame of my clip. The video showed the model how everything should move. The image showed it what everything should look like at the start.

And it worked. Surprisingly well. I still had to generate a few times, but after a handful of tries I had some really good takes. The camera stayed behind him. He jumped from the bridge. He landed on the truck. Exactly like the reference, finally.

Surf's up

With the jump in the bag, the rest felt almost easy. I generated the second shot with Seedance as well: the monkey on top of the truck, riding it down the highway like a wave. The surf shot I had pictured all along.

I'm really happy with how it turned out. It's a silly little scene, but it's the one that beat every tool before it, and now it finally exists.

Funny detail: on TikTok it has fewer views than most of my clips, but it's among the ones with the most likes. Not many people saw it. The ones who did seem to love it.

I'll take that.

 https://chris-garcia.art/