Odo's Wish
in this story a prideful man gets his wish.
I used AI to research tropes of African folk tales.
I settled on a brief retelling of a story involving a magic wish-granting tree.
The first AI-driven draft was pretty bad... on the nose and obvious.
But ultimately I let the literal take on the man's wish drive the tragic turn.
Gemini/Flow for the images and videos.
I found the narrator's voice first and decided to stick with that even though flow videos are capped at around 15 seconds. By overlaying images it is far easier than constantly wrestling with the AI-generated videos. (things you don't see include: the narrator acting out the part of Odo, the narrator changing age. Occasionally he stops moving his mouth with the words. In one bizarre moment he delivered his lines and then stopped, looked out into the distance, and made a dour expression. )
I forgot to add music... so, the background was a last minute addition, but it only took a few generations to get what i wanted. The only trick there was that Lyria 3 sits inside of the google video editor... ihad to export to mp4, then found restream.io for converting the 'video' file to just mp3 audio.
One other hard-fought lesson was with CapCut... this was my first time using it on PC (have used phone version many times...) I had no idea how to add a track... it is NOT obvious. To add the overlay track with images, I had to 'lock' the video track. Then adding images to the timeline meant a new track.
I'd say I learned a lot with this. Coudn't have done it without AI... it was still a struggle at times, but a linear path: Concept>story/ dialogue> create characters, create narration, add images, add music, edit it all together and then post to YouTube.: