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The Painter of Cities is a Melius-built cinematic short about an impossible gilded automaton that paints a living city onto a monumental black wall. From the city he creates, a female droid briefly appears within the painted surface. They reach toward each other, almost touching, before she is reclaimed by the wall.
It is a quiet story about creation, longing, and the tragedy of making something beautiful that cannot fully enter your world.
https://app.melius.com/projects/23546fb0-e3a3-4074-925f-676dfe384aad/canvas/f96fdb6f-cf03-40cd-ba59-f1ddd40a23a6
PROCESS STEPS
The project began with the challenge theme: create something that should exist, but doesnāt.
The core concept became The Painter of Cities: an impossible gilded automaton that paints a living city onto a monumental black wall.
Melius was used to generate sequential image keyframes for the story: the city being painted, the female droid appearing inside the wall, their near-touch, and her return to the painted surface.
The prompts were refined through several iterations to preserve visual continuity across the male droid, female droid, city wall, studio, palette, and old-master oil-paint aesthetic.
Short silent video scenes were generated from the keyframes, then adjusted to control pacing, motion, transitions, and emotional tone.
The video scenes were stitched into a final silent film. An original instrumental music cue was generated to match the final timing and emotional arc of the film.
FEEDBACK ON USING MELIUS
Melius worked best as a visual production canvas rather than a one-shot generator. The node-based workflow made it possible to build the project step by step: image keyframes, video scenes, stitching, music, and final assets.The strongest part was being able to iterate visually and preserve the creative process inside the canvas.The hardest part was controlling motion continuity between generated video clips. Some transitions and character movements required very precise prompting, especially when preserving the same droid designs and painterly world across multiple nodes.
The idea of something creating beauty it can never fully touch is genuinely haunting, especially with the painterly continuity carried across the whole workflow.
Thank you!
ā¢ May 17
Stunning!
Thank you
This is commercial grade, cinematic experience, absolutely amazing work and the video...so powerful thematic, abstract and mistical, movie like, really.
This is definitely Top personal favorite on this hackathon. Excellent job @Jelena Stricak !š just WOW!š„
Thank you so much for your kind words!
What a video, wow! Brilliant @Jelena Stricak !
Thanks, Tim!
The visual continuity across scenes is honestly impressive here. @Jelena Stricak
Thank you!
Nice work
Thanks š
Great Work..
Thank you š
Looks awesome! How much time did it take you to do this work?
I'm bit obsessed with droids so idea was done in 5 minutes š
And building, generating the music, recording videos.. Maybe couple of hours.
Love what i'm seeing already
Thanks š
Amazing one bro! Love it
Bro š Thank you!
Amazing!
Thank you Sharon
My pleasure!
Really compelling concept the ācreation trapped inside its own mediumā idea is powerful, especially with that near-touch moment.
The node-based workflow sounds like it fits this kind of iterative visual storytelling really well.
Yes, all clicked together well.
Thanks!
Honestly, droids in historical settings have become a real obsession for me. The Renaissance feels natural because it brings together the worlds Iām always moving between: history, art, old systems of knowledge, and the digital tools shaping whatever comes next.
Incredible work!!!
Thank you!
Thanks
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Vesper is a night-sky companion that does one thing: tells you what's worth stepping outside for tonight, when to go, and exactly where to look.
Built fully interactively in Google Stitch across 18 screens. A live celestial dashboard, a clockwork orrery with all 8 planets orbiting in real time, constellation deep-dives, ISS pass tracking, moon phase morphing, and a personal observation log. Everything in one place, nothing you don't need.
The aesthetic comes from antique star atlases and brass instruments. Deep midnight canvas, warm gold linework, three typefaces locked to strict roles. No neon. Something that feels like a precision tool you'd genuinely want to return to every clear evening.
The Problem:
Most people have looked up at the sky and felt something, then had no idea what they were actually looking at. Existing apps don't help. They're either buried in data, built for astronomers, or so technically overwhelming that curiosity dies before it starts. Nobody has built the calm, beautiful version. The one that just says: here's what's worth going outside for tonight.
The Solution:
Vesper is that app. It starts with the one question that actually matters: what should I look for tonight, and answers it clearly, beautifully, without making you feel like you need a degree first. The design is warm and considered rather than cold and clinical, because a tool you enjoy looking at is a tool you actually use. For those who want to go deeper, the depth is there. But it never gets in the way.
How Stitch Was Used:
Streaming generation
Every screen started as a detailed natural-language prompt, watched streaming live onto the canvas. There is something genuinely different about seeing a complex layout appear in real time rather than staring at a blank artboard. The Tonight dashboard, the Orrery, the sky gradient on Sun and Twilight. All of them generated in one shot from a single prompt. That moment is worth capturing in any walkthrough video.
In-place AI edits
After the initial generation, individual elements were refined by clicking directly on them and describing the change in plain language. Things like "make the meteor streaks fire in groups of three with different angles", "add a real dark-mode map with a street grid", "set Sky Map as the active sidebar item", and "replace the static stars with the same drifting animation as the Welcome screen". This is where Stitch earns its keep. It stops feeling like a design tool and starts feeling like a conversation. You say what you want, you watch it happen, you iterate.
Motion and shader pass
Once the layout of each screen was locked, a dedicated motion pass was run. The star-field drift, the clockwork orbital animation, the constellation line draw-ins, the nebula gradients, the meteor shower effects. Each one added through a focused prompt rather than a timeline or a code editor. The motion system is what makes Vesper feel alive, and all of it came through Stitch.
Platform Feedback:
Stitch's streaming generation is the most effective tool for dark, data-dense dashboard screens. There is no blank-canvas problem when a complex layout streams in live. The in-place editing workflow is where the real value lives: clicking a single element and describing a change in natural language ("make this feel more like a brass instrument") is closer to having a design conversation than using a tool.
Here is the Project Live Link:
https://vespersky-companion.netlify.app/
ā¢ Jun 1
Pure sophistication. The contrast, the typography, the data layout and absolutely flawless execution.
I used Google Stitch as the primary tool to design and build Sprout, a mobile habit tracker where every habit hatches a creature that grows with your streak. The entire project, five screens from onboarding to habit detail, was built using Stitch's streaming canvas generation, in-place AI editing, native HTML animation, and Netlify export.
My workflow was prompt driven. I wrote a detailed description for each screen, watched Stitch stream it to the canvas in real time, then used in-place edits to refine the creature illustrations, background colors, button shapes, and animation behaviors. The celebration screen and the dark habit detail screen went through the most iteration and the results exceeded what I expected from a single session.
On the platform experience, Stitch is genuinely fast and the streaming generation is satisfying to work with. The 3D creature illustrations it produced had real personality, I expected flat icons and got fully rendered characters. The main friction was component consistency, editing one element sometimes caused adjacent ones to regenerate, and the export works per screen rather than as a unified project. A component locking feature would make the workflow much smoother. Overall it is a strong tool and I can see it becoming a regular part of my prototyping workflow.
ā¢ Jun 1
This is a really impressive use case for Stitch. The idea of tying habit tracking to creature growth makes the experience feel much more engaging and rewarding than traditional streak-based apps.
overall well thought Concept and then implementation š
The Editor Behind Every Story
Concept
For this reinterpretation, I imagined CapCut not as a tool, but as a lifelong storytellerāthe invisible editor helping us make sense of the moments that shape who we become.
The film follows a young man who discovers a letter written by his 10-year-old self. As he revisits the dreams, expectations, and promises contained in the letter, he realizes that while life did not unfold exactly as planned, every experience, relationship, and memory became part of a story still being written.
CapCut is reimagined as the editor behind every storyāquietly helping us preserve, connect, and give meaning to the chapters of our lives.
Creative Process
The visual development began inside CapCut Design Studio, where I explored references and inspiration from the existing asset library to establish the emotional tone and visual language of the film.
Using Design Studio, I generated the key still images for each scene, developing the characters, environments, and cinematic moments that would form the narrative. These images became the visual foundation of the project.
The generated stills were then animated and sequenced in Runway to create motion, allowing the story to unfold through a series of interconnected moments and memories. Throughout the process, the focus remained on creating an emotional journey that reflected the film's central idea: that every life is a story still being edited.
Final Message
Every life is a story still being edited.
You were never writing it alone.
CapCut ā The Editor Behind Every Story.
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