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 doesn’t. 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.

Stunning!

Hey Contra 👋 I've been heads-down building Promptly, and I'd love your eyes on it before our launch.

From my time delivering over 20 software projects as a tech lead, I realized the biggest bottleneck in building an app isn't the code itself. It is communication. Founders speak in ideas, and developers speak in strict logic.

Here is how Promptly works. You just describe your app idea in plain English. The AI actually pushes back, asks the hard questions, catches the vague bits, and automatically writes a developer-ready blueprint as you chat.

The goal is simple. When you hand this document to a developer, the next thing you get back is an accurate, fixed-price quote. No more wasting days trying to draft technical specifications and sitting through endless rounds of discovery calls just to get on the same page.

Instead of staring at a blank document, you get three tools that update in real-time:

The Pushback Chat: It refuses to just nod along. If you say "make it fast and secure," it helps you define exactly what that means. It hunts down edge cases before you ever pay someone to fix them.

The Visual Map: A live, interactive diagram showing exactly how your features connect. It catches logic flaws and missing steps before any code is written.

The Living Blueprint: An auto-generated, professional project spec that exports straight to Notion, Linear, or PDF.

Plus, it gives your idea a "Developer-Readiness Score" out of 100 so you know if it is actually ready to build. It even recommends the best tech stack based on your specific budget and complexity.

The core engine and all of these interactive features are fully functional right now, but I am still smoothing out the final rough edges. I am aiming for a public launch in about three weeks.

Where I need your help. I have three quick questions:

Where would you want to export your project blueprint, beyond Notion, Linear, or PDF?

What is the biggest headache you face right now when trying to explain your ideas to developers?

What feels missing? The blind spots are the most valuable to me right now.

Any feedback on new features, improvements, or things I should kill entirely would be hugely appreciated. Drop a comment below.

Thank you for taking a look 🙏

building solo, in public

This is a very interesting concept! Where did you design the UI/UX? I feel like a better choice of font is still out there. Overall good work and clean UI. 🔥