Tom Tykwer's team turns a small stage cast into a full school with Seedance 2.5

Bonn Park's stage play Volcano High became a one-minute trailer: under ten real actors, with ByteDance's Seedance 2.5 adding the school and the crowd. Every detail so far comes from BytePlus, which sells the model.

Run Lola Run director Tom Tykwer is working with playwright and director Bonn Park and producer Sarika Hemi Lakhani on a screen version of Volcano High, Park's stage play. The first result is a one-minute trailer made with Dreamina Seedance 2.5, ByteDance's video model, for BytePlus's Next Frame series.

The method is the interesting part. The cast was filmed for real, then Seedance rebuilt what surrounds them. BytePlus puts it as fewer than ten live actors, a school filled with hundreds of students, and one continuous shot. Side by side clips in its film show the same dancers in an ordinary school gym, then in a yellow cafeteria with a giant broccoli and a volcano outside the windows.

This is not a clip typed into a box. The performances stay human and the model does the set and crowd work a visual effects team would usually do. The credits include X Filme, the company Tykwer co-founded, and the German studio Chapter 41, whose co-founder Lars Stark is named as AI effects designer.

It lands the same day ByteDance's Volcano Engine released a 4K version of Seedance 2.5 for film and TV, open only to selected enterprise customers, with cheap 480p drafts before a final 4K render and no public price. BytePlus has not said whether the trailer used it.

Our take: the actors set the performance and the model builds the world around them. That is a deal many directors can sign up to.

Source: BytePlus Next Frame posts and film, Oct 23, 2026; Volcano Engine via TechNode, Oct 23, 2026.