Experiment: Artlist Kling 1.6 vs Kling 2.5 Turbo

I’ve been running an experiment to see if an AI video model could convincingly age a child’s face into an adult version of herself — smooth, cinematic, and emotionally continuous. It’s proving harder than it sounds.

Attempted about six updates of the prompt (with ChatGPT assistance) but could not get the girls face to morph. Takeaways

Things I Tried

• Prompt weighting:I discovered that without phrases like “same person,” “identical eyes,” or “age progression of the same face,” the model assumes it’s swapping one character for another instead of aging a single person.

• Morph duration:Most models — including Kling — compress transitions into one or two seconds. Extending this requires setting --morph-duration long or adding temporal cues such as “the morph continues for several seconds before any camera movement.” 

•  timing cue (“fully completing before any camera movement”) 

  
  

Why It Still Isn’t Working (Yet)

• Lack of facial-identity anchoring:The AI treats the child and adult as separate subjects because their facial geometry isn’t linked in the model’s latent space. It doesn’t “know” they’re meant to be the same person at different ages.

• No cross-frame feature tracking:Current video models don’t consistently track key landmarks — eyes, nose, mouth — between frames. Without that continuity, identity drifts or resets as the morph progresses.

  
  

What’s Next

I’m still looking for a solution

Tools

https://artlist.io/

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Prompt

Text to Image

a young cacusian female child with light brown hair, about 8 years old, frantically treading water in the open sea. The camera POV starts as a closeup on her face and then pulls back to show her tony body in the vast ocean. She is crying and trying not to submerge. The entire scene is in black and white like a dream.

Image to Image - Animate

Ultra-realistic cinematic scene.

A slow, cinematic camera push-in toward a young girl frantically treading water alone in the open ocean. Large waves roll around her; sunlight glimmers across the surface, scattering gold and blue reflections.

Her face fills the frame — terrified yet fiercely determined to stay afloat. Her wet hair clings to her cheeks; her lips tremble as she gasps for air. The sound of the sea muffles everything except her breathing.

The camera continues pushing closer, perfectly steady and centred on her face.

Now the transformation begins.

A detailed, gradual age-morph sequence unfolds while the camera holds position:

Her eyes remain locked on the camera as her face ages in real time — cheeks hollow slightly, jawline strengthens, fine lines form around her eyes and mouth. Her hair lengthens and darkens with streaks of salt and sun; her skin shows subtle sun-weathering and maturity.

The change continues for several seconds, fully completing before any camera movement. She is now a 40-year-old woman — the unmistakable grown version of the child, with identical eyes and expression, weathered but peaceful.

She exhales softly, the ripples shifting around her chin. She stares directly into the lens — calm, resolute, accepting.

Only then does the camera move with a slow pull-back.

She begins to sink slowly beneath the surface.

The camera holds still as the ripples close above her. A lingering pause. Then the camera pulls back slowly and rises sharply into the sky, revealing the vast, endless ocean stretching to the horizon, golden and infinite.

Lighting: natural golden-hour sunlight filtering through water, soft diffusion, warm rim-light on face, gentle lens flares.

Mood: hauntingly beautiful, reflective, tragic, transformative.

Style: cinematic realism, smooth age-morph VFX (face-focused), underwater translucence, high-detail skin texture, 4 K film look, shallow depth of field, steady camera hold before pull-out, drone-style aerial rise, natural colour grading. --ar 16:9

--style cinematic

--motion smooth

--quality high

--lighting natural

--face-detail ultra

--morph-duration long

--vfx-morph seamless

--water-detail high

--focus face

--no double_face

--no flicker

--color-grade warm

--camera-stabilization strong

Kling 1.6

Kling 2.5