How I made this
The video, the website, and what it cost.
The video
I'm not an animator, illustrator, or video editor. I made the demo video in a weekend using a pipeline I figured out as I went.
1
Illustrated the panels in Gemini. I described each scene — me on the couch, Gina's ears perking up, the TV content changing — and iterated until the style was consistent across all frames.
2
Animated transitions with Flow (Veo). Each pair of panels became a short animated clip — Gina going from calm to alert, from alert to barking, from the couch to the floor. First frame in, last frame in, describe the motion.
3
Edited in CapCut. Stitched the clips, smoothed the transitions, aligned the framing (the AI generated slightly different crops each time), and added dissolves between scenes.
4
Sound design from Freesound.org. Dinner ambience, doorbell, dog barking, baby crying — all Creative Commons licensed, all individually attributed. I processed each sound to feel like it was coming through a TV speaker, not piped in directly.
The visuals in this video were made with AI. I'd hire a human illustrator if I could afford one right now. This is a budget constraint, not a preference.
Total cost of the video: the time it took, plus $11.99 for a month of CapCut Pro. The AI tools were free tiers.
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