8h (edited) • 🛠️ Show Your Work
How did I make my first video with Jakes ICM?
asked how my animations come out the way they do. I said I brain dumped and went YOLO. That was half true, so here's the proper answer.
First, Jake's kit. I run it as it came and haven't touched the engine. The thing it does that matters most is timing: it turns the voice into word timestamps, so animations land on the exact word being said. That's why it feels designed and not just pasted on. Otherwise, I just started a session in my project folder that contained it and told it to use that workflow. I did not start a session at the proper folder ICM level.
Second, the drawings aren't the kit's stock characters. Claude wrote custom drawing code on top of it. My character, a race car driver mechanic type, is drawn once in a shared file and reused in every scene, so he never drifts. He came from me rejecting two attempts and saying what I wanted. Though it felt very brief and quick based on some general desires.
Third, and I think this is the real answer, the way it got built. Every video is split into short scenes. One AI builds a scene, a different AI looks at still frames of it and sends it back. Most first builds got sent back. In one pass, all eight scenes did. When a reviewer noticed the crew drawn three different ways, we locked the drawings into one library and every scene had to use it. I also wrote the look down first: my colors, one highlight at a time, big text, calm motion. This was the automated part of my mess.
My part was almost all "what", not "how" and honing it in. Stuff like "the hand looks off around 1:55", "too much green", "the ending's abrupt", "wrong theme, give me options". About 16 rounds of that across five videos. That's the YOLO part I undersold: I didn't write any technique, but I did a lot of looking and saying no. This is also the part that I will be able to create my own process from, and it only took a couple tries. The ROI on YOLO mode is well worth it.
Two things that saved me the most time. Picking from options instead of describing a look (four themes, a few character styles), and getting the idea out of my head first. My first versions were wrong because Claude guessed what I meant - here is where I learned just from one video how to better review a transcript before we generate the audio, and to generate the audio before we generate the preview slide deck of the animations, and then tie it all together, and then preview the whole thing. And that led to less steps because I noticed getting to the end result and modifying different elements of it was. More tedious and time-consuming and less productive.
I hope this helps..
Context: Here are my additional Skool posts
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How did I make my first video with Jakes ICM?
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