Blog post to animated short

The person picks one written post. You deliver a ~45 s vertical (1080×1920) animated short: narrated, stylized, with captions and a few motion-graphic cards in the publication's brand, plus the same cut without on-screen words.

Defaults unless the person says otherwise: a stylized look (paper-cut works well), never photoreal; a fictional protagonist, never a real person; the product or publication named in full in the narration, never as an acronym; words on screen only from the compositor, never generated into a still or a clip. Record the approved script, the picks and the fix list where you keep the job's notes; rounds and deliverables follow the core skill.

Steps

1. Read the post in full. Note its claim, its own examples, its key advice, and one detail of its world worth a nod (a city, a season, a light).
2. Shot list and narration. 9 shots of about 5 s, about 110 words (≈44 s at a conversational pace). A shape that works: the post and its claim; 2–3 shots of the old pain played for gentle comedy; the turn; 2–3 shots built on the post's own examples; its key advice; a closing line that ties the video back to the post. One location, one fictional protagonist. Gate: a numbered list; nothing is made before a yes.
3. Narrator and set, together. The narrator per guide-voice-a-script (A narrator for a short): three voices on the whole script, the pick is the take, its alignment gives the word times. Spell names the way they sound, and tell the person where a pronunciation comes from. The set (guide-design-a-set, nano-banana-design-empty-set) in the paper-cut line (guide-pick-a-stylized-look, references/looks.md), two 9:16 2K takes on nano banana Pro. Gate: a voice and a set, a review_choose each, in the same turn.
4. The character (nano-banana-character-sheet): two sheets, two different people, the picked set as the style reference. Gate: a character.
5. Stills (guide-pick-a-stylized-look, Process step 4): staged in the set (nano-banana-stage-cast-in-set; for tight shots, crop the 2K plate and scale it back up first), one take a shot, all at once; a new location uses the set only as a style reference. Gate: the stills.
6. Animate (guide-pick-a-stylized-look, Process step 5; paper-cut at 1080P), each shot's duration its window up to the next shot's start, one seed, all nine at once, on a price.
7. Cut (ffmpeg-cut-clips-to-a-voiceover, 1080×1920, the clips at about 0.22, a 0.7 s tail), −16 LUFS (ffmpeg-normalize-loudness). Gate: the cut.
8. Word times for the cards and captions from the take's alignment (python-read-word-timings); a name respelled for the voice is spelled as respelled there, so map it back before it goes on screen.
9. Brand (guide-capture-a-brand): the publication's font, accent colour and logo.
10. Cards and captions (guide-add-titles-and-motion-graphics): one compositor spec over the cut, its own audio as the spec's audio, built by a script from the word times.
    • Cards: 5–6 in the top third, over sky or wall, never the action: the publication's masthead as the opener, then one per beat that has a number or a named thing (a wait in weeks, the tools the post replaces struck through with a drawn path, the result's time, the key advice as a small object), and a closing card. Make them belong to the film: the paper-cut card style is in guide-caption-a-video, references/paper-cut-cards.md.
    • Captions, calm (guide-caption-a-video, the calm route, its 9:16 numbers).
    • Stills at every card and a sheet of the caption band. Gate: the live spec (hn4a-compositor, Live spec, then render), with the stills; a later fix to a few seconds re-renders with --into.
11. Deliver per the core skill: deliver the cut and the cut without on-screen words.

Choices this workflow makes

• One set, one take a still and a clip. Redoing a shot ($0.50–1.25) is cheaper than three takes of everything.
• Captions and cards live in the compositor spec, so they change and re-render in under a minute with no model spend.
• Gated: the script, voice, set, character, narration, stills, cut and the card and caption design; the animation batch goes on a price.

Dead ends

• A karaoke pill on the captions, then shorter phrases: both dropped (guide-caption-a-video, Choosing).
• A name the TTS read wrong until it was respelled in the narration text.
• A logo placed by file path inside a text layer showed in the preview but came out blank in the render (hn4a-compositor).

Worked example

A 4-minute newsletter issue from Globex's newsletter, about planning a small garden with an app, became a 45.5 s paper-cut short, 1080×1920 at 24 fps: a one-person potting shed on a hillside, nine shots, a market-stall scene taken from the post's own example. Cards: the masthead, a "2 weeks" wait, a struck-out "Sketchbook / Spreadsheet / Calendar" stack of the tools the post replaces, a "20 min" result, and a seed-packet swatch for the post's key advice. Calm word-by-word captions in the newsletter's own font (Brand Sans) with key words in a lightened lavender accent.

Spend: $11.50 (stills $0.17 each, the nine clips about $8.70, voice and sets the rest). The graphics rendered locally in 35 s.