PJ Ace posted a feature film teaser today. Kelly Boesch posted two test videos last weekend. Neural Viz listed his toolchain in a description back in May. Mr Relative put out a short action movie in February with the model's name in the title.
None of them mention each other, but all four are using Seedance.
I noticed because I built something this week that watches the YouTube feeds of every creator we've published a profile on, and keeps track of any new work. It surfaced thirteen uploads in one morning. Four of the names attached to them kept saying the same word.
What each of them actually did
PJ Ace, who made an NBA Finals ad for $2,000, has been on a run. In June he put out a five-minute teaser for Nexus, his hybrid feature, and wrote that it was "made by 3 people in 2 weeks" using Dreamina and Seedance 2.0. On July 1st, episode two — "made this with a small team in 6 days," this time crediting "Seedance 2.0 4K in CapCut Video Studio." This week, a third teaser, made with Seedance 2.5.
Three films in eight weeks, which is pretty insane.
Kelly Boesch, whose whole studio is one person, was doing something smaller and more interesting. She watched the trailer for The Odyssey, wanted to know whether a model could reproduce one shot from it — the sea with the massive whirlpool — and made a whole trailer to find out. Her words on the result: "It came out insane." The same weekend she ran a Blade Runner-style image-to-video test, and described that one as "using #Seedance 2.0 in #RunwayML."
Neural Viz, who runs an entire TV universe, is the one who tips his hand least. On "Breaking Into Black Holes" in May, the description is a list with no punctuation: Runway Seedance Nano Banana Eleven Labs Suno. Five tools, one film, no explanation. And Mr Relative, who put his AI work in a physical room this summer, got there first, back in February, with a short film that says "made with Seedance 2.0" right in the title.
Nobody went looking for it
Not one of these people went to a website called Seedance and signed up.
PJ Ace found it inside CapCut and inside Dreamina. Kelly found it inside Runway. Neural Viz has it sitting in a stack next to Suno and ElevenLabs. Seedance is ByteDance's video model, and Dreamina and CapCut are both ByteDance products — TechCrunch reported in March that Dreamina Seedance 2.0 was rolling into CapCut, starting with users in Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
So four artists, working separately, on different continents' worth of tooling, all ended up pointed at the same model. Three of them got there through an app they already had open.
Now, you could argue this just means ByteDance has excellent distribution, and honestly — yes. That's what happened. I think it's the most useful thing here for anyone making work of their own. In most of these cases nobody ran a comparison at all. It was sitting in the editor they already had open, on the day they had an idea.
I don't think that's a small thing. I've watched a lot of people pick tools, myself included, and "it was already in the app" beats "it scored higher" more often than any of us like to admit.
You may already have it
If you edit in CapCut, or you've been paying for Runway, there's a decent chance you already have access to the thing four working artists have been shipping films with. Worth ten minutes finding out before you buy another subscription.
The version numbers are a mess, though, and I'd rather say so than pretend otherwise. In the space of five months these four have named Seedance 2.0, Seedance 2.0 4K, and Seedance 2.5, and there's a Seedance 2.0 Omni floating around in the tutorial world. Whatever's inside your app may not be what PJ Ace was using this week. Check before you assume the result you saw is the result you'll get.
Two more caveats, because they matter.
PJ Ace said Dreamina gave him access — "@Dreaminaofficial gave us access to Dreamina Seedance 2.5." That's an early-access relationship, and it belongs in the frame when you're reading his enthusiasm. The films are real either way. But he started from a place a normal account doesn't, and you should weigh his results against that.
And four is four. We've profiled a dozen creators with channels, and eight of them aren't mentioned in this piece at all. I noticed a pattern. Somebody with a bigger sample might find it doesn't hold.
I can't tell whether any of them chose it
What I can't tell from a YouTube description is whether any of them chose it.
Kelly's posts read like genuine curiosity — she saw a shot in a trailer, wondered if she could get it, and posted the attempt. That's a person testing a tool. PJ Ace's read like a production schedule. Neural Viz's five-word list reads like a man who has stopped caring which logo is on the thing and simply grabs whichever one makes the shot.
That last one might be where this ends up for most people. A shelf of models, and enough taste to know which one to reach for.
I'd love to hear from any of them on that, honestly. If you're reading this and you're one of the four — did you pick it, or did it just turn up?