A holiday video of a holiday that never happened

Generating one good picture of a couple on a mountain road is easy. Generating fifteen of them, where it is recognisably the same couple and the same van each time, is the entire job — and it is where most AI films fall apart. By shot six the man has a different nose, the woman has aged five years, and the vehicle has changed shape, so what you have is fifteen postcards rather than one story. The fix is not a better prompt. It is that your first two pictures stop being pictures and become references: you attach them to every generation afterwards, so each new shot is drawn as a variation on people who already exist rather than invented from the words again. We made a film to prove it — "A Brown Cow Ate The Map", about a couple who get pleasantly lost in Austria — and everything below is reproducible in the editor with the same buttons.

Perfect for

Some moments this fits — there are more.

How it works

1. 1

   Choose the shape, then write the song

   Start a project and pick Widescreen if it is going to YouTube, vertical if it is going to Reels or TikTok. Then write the song — paste your own lyrics or have them written, describe how it should sound, and generate the track for 30 tokens. Do this before the pictures: the song's length decides how many shots you need. Ours came back at 2:44, which is about fifteen.

2. 2

   Make two plates that never appear in the film

   Generate one picture of your cast and one of the vehicle or the place. Judge them hard — everything downstream inherits them, so a face you are lukewarm about now is a face you will dislike fifteen times. 32 tokens each at 2K. When you like them, they stop being shots and become your references.

3. 3

   Write each shot, and keep the references attached

   A prompt is a shot description: where they are, what the light is doing, and what must not be in the frame. Attach both plates to every generation. "Create again" keeps the whole form — prompt, both references, model, aspect ratio, quality — so each new shot is edit-the-prompt and submit. Budget 90 to 150 seconds per image; the on-screen estimate is optimistic.

4. 4

   Animate the few that earn it

   Send four or five stills to the video model for about five seconds of real movement each, at 15 tokens a second. Spend it on motion the eye expects — water falling, a vehicle travelling, wind — not evenly across the film. Twenty stills with four moving among them reads as a film; twenty moving clips reads as a showreel and costs six times more.

5. 5

   Add the clips, then fit them to the song

   Add the shots you want to the timeline and use Auto-arrange to fit them to the song's length. Fifteen shots became twenty-five cuts at about six seconds each, ending exactly when the music does. Two things worth knowing: turn collages off unless you want photos grouped four-to-a-frame, and check the arrangement drew from the clips you added rather than from everything the project has ever held.

6. 6

   Fix the first shot and the last shot

   Nothing in the arrangement knows which of your pictures is the punchline. Ours landed at position eleven and the film ended on a dinner table; two drags in the Organize sheet fixed it. Opening and closing frames are the only two positions worth setting by hand — the middle takes care of itself.

7. 7

   Put the words on screen, and render

   Turn lyrics on so the words light up in time with the music. In widescreen, raise the size — the default is set for a phone-shaped frame and looks small on a television. Then render at 1 token a second. The whole film, from empty project to finished file, came to 1,167 tokens.

Other use cases