A second brand, made real: Elementals.nl
The same video studio, pointed at a different, live product — Elementals.nl, a Big Five personality assessment. We adopted its existing brand, built a reusable leader, drove its real /en app for the footage, and shipped a finished English walkthrough in both 16:9 and 9:16 — for about $0.61 in API generation. Here is exactly how, and what it cost.
"Meet your elements" — 31.5s, 16:9. Generated five-elements leader · real /en screens · a Norse-archetype hero · titles set in the brand's own font. Made by the studio, held to the same quality bar.
Adopt the brand — don't invent one
Elementals already had a complete style guide, implemented as design tokens. The studio's intake gate adopts that canon rather than guessing: the exact palette, the display font (Outfit), and the tone rules ("assessment", never "test"). The film's titles are set in Outfit too — so they read as part of the product, not stuck on top of it.
One keyframe, validated before anything scales
The brand mark is a five-sided pentagon — five elements. So the leader is five elemental energies converging into that pentagon. We generated a single keyframe first (nano-banana), checked it, then animated it (image-to-video) and reversed it for the outro. Proving the hardest shot once is what keeps a series cheap — you never fan out a look you haven't confirmed.
We drove the real product — using its own test rig
The screens are not mock-ups. We captured the live /en app deterministically, reusing Elementals' own Playwright setup (the one it runs UATs with) — so every run yields identical frames, and languages or variants can be re-captured without drift. Screen capture like this is free; it is the biggest reason a walkthrough stays cheap.
Landing
The real hero: "Discover your Big Five type and archetype in 5 minutes."
The free result
A public example report — Big Five bars + archetype — so no login was needed.
16 archetypes
The Norse-archetype grid, each tagged in its element's colour.
Both ratios from one build — for $0 more
The 9:16 cutdown reuses every paid asset: the leader is reframed (the pentagon sits centre), the screens are re-captured natively on a mobile viewport and scroll through the real pages, and the titles re-flow to portrait. No new generation — so the vertical costs nothing extra to produce.
The vertical is a genuine native-mobile capture — the pages scroll to reveal real content (the hero, the free-report promise, the founder, the archetype cards), not a stretched desktop grab.
What it cost — and when it costs more
The honest headline: the money is in AI generation — mainly image-to-video — not in the edit. Screen captures, stills with motion, the montage and every re-run are free. Here is this film, itemised.
| Item | How | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Leader keyframe | nano-banana Pro, 2K | $0.16 |
| Leader motion (→ reversed for the outro) | fal Veo-3-Fast, 1080p, 4s | ~$0.40 |
| Outro | reversed leader (ffmpeg) | $0 |
| Archetype hero | still + ffmpeg push-in & glow | $0 |
| 3 real /en screens | Playwright capture rig | $0 |
| Audio bed (42s) | fal stable-audio | ~$0.05 |
| Montage + grade (16:9 and 9:16) | ffmpeg + ImageMagick | $0 |
| Total | one paid bracket + one bed; the rest free | ≈ $0.61 |
It costs more when…
- more image-to-video shots × more seconds × higher resolution (i2v is by far the biggest line)
- you use higher-tier models (Pro, Veo-3, 4K) where a cheaper tier would do
- you fan out to N languages/ratios that each generate instead of reusing one master
- you iterate without a PoC — regenerating a look you never validated
- the film is fully-AI: many generated shots instead of captured ones
It costs less when…
- you lean on real captures ($0) — like this walkthrough
- a still with ffmpeg motion (push-in, glow) replaces an i2v shot
- the leader/outro bracket is built once and reused on every film
- you validate one PoC before fanning out — no wasted generations
- the audio is a generated bed and re-runs of the edit stay free
The studio travels to any brand
Adopt the brand, prove the signature once, drive the real product, fan out for free. A finished, on-brand walkthrough for a second product — in a few hours, at a bar you set, for under a euro of generation.