Yesterday I packaged the pipeline that renders my hand-drawn explainer videos from a Markdown storyboard. Today I used it the way I think it should be used: as a gift.
The rule was simple. Find a launch post on DEV that I actually liked, turn the first screen of its README into a 30 to 65 second cartoon, and leave it in the comments with no strings. No price, no "DM me", and every number in the cartoon taken from the author's own post. If anything was wrong, I'd re-render the shot.
Eight posts, one day. Here they are, with the length of each cartoon and what the post had going for it when I picked it:
| Post | Cartoon | Reactions on the post today |
|---|---|---|
| Lockdown, a hackathon platform in one Python process | 32 s | 16 |
| hjkl, a vim trainer built for a husband | 42 s | 44 |
| A landslide rain check for a friend in Pokhara | 51 s | 28 |
| KTCL CommuteShield, a bus-card guardian in Goa | 43 s | 35 |
| Broke Date, a student's month played out 500 times on an i3 | 55 s | 24 |
| inkwand, a study notebook for a brother | 54 s | 16 |
| Krisp, a beat studio that keeps the 40 milliseconds | 51 s | 21 |
| The colony dilemma, one sentence decided honesty 40 of 40 | 65 s | 19 |
All eight are on one page, no sign-up: https://ssap-pa.github.io/scripttoon-samples/
What the authors said
Four of the eight replied within hours. Their words, from the public comment threads:
- "Okay, I genuinely did not expect anyone to turn this into a hand-drawn video 😂 So cool. I watched it and I don't think anything misrepresents hjkl at all."
- "I mean dude its insane"
- "this is actually crazy, Love how you turned the README into a whole animation!"
- "Thank you, that line really is the heart of it :)"
Nobody asked me to change a shot. Three answered the question I'd put at the end of the comment (whether a vim command ever leaves the Review list; why a hackathon platform makes zero outbound network calls; whether a streak or a green tick is what moves a student), which is the kind of reply a comment with a question gets and a comment with a link doesn't.
How each one took under an hour
The pipeline is the same one I wrote up two days ago. For a gift, the work is:
- Read the post twice and pick the three claims that carry it. Usually the author has already written the hook; it's the sentence they'd be embarrassed to cut.
- Write a three-shot storyboard in Markdown. Narration is the author's numbers, reworded only for the voice.
- Map each shot to a background (a desk, a notebook, a park, a workshop) and two cut-out characters: a kid in a blue hoodie as the builder or the friend, a yellow robot as the thing they built.
- Render, look at five frames, fix overlapping labels, re-render that one shot.
- Upload, link, write the comment with one real question in it.
The characters are the same eight poses in every cartoon. That's the trick that makes eight in a day possible: no drawing, just storyboard and placement.
What I learned
- A comment that gives something concrete gets a reply. A comment that offers something abstract doesn't. The service post I wrote yesterday, "I'll make one for your project", got zero replies in a day; eight finished videos got four conversations in an afternoon.
- The "one real question" at the end matters. Three of the four replies answered the question before anything else.
- The authors who replied fastest were the ones whose posts were about a friend or a relative. A cartoon of the person you built the thing for lands differently than a cartoon of a feature list.
If you'd like one for your own project, the samples page says how it works, and the engine that renders them is a package if you'd rather run it yourself: https://payhip.com/b/A2wa8
And if you're one of the eight and want a longer cut, say so in the thread. That part isn't a gift, but the first screen always is.
Top comments (0)