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I made a short AI film with @Sarah Smaili for the CapCut LA Challenge on Contra. 🦉
The story started with a TV show I loved as a kid. I wanted to bring back that feeling of a small fantasy world where anything could happen. The owl that delivers the letters is a little nod to Harry Potter.
I’ve wanted to try AI video for a long time, and it turned out to be more design work than I expected.
A few things that made the difference:
➡️ We planned the story first, then used Claude to split it into scenes
➡️ Every character got a character sheet and one fixed prompt, reused in every shot
➡️ For each shot we wrote what should happen, and also what should not
➡️ Image references next to the text worked much better than text alone
The hardest part was keeping characters looking the same from shot to shot while still matching the picture in my head. Most of that was solved before we generated anything, by planning and describing details clearly.
Big thanks to @Sarah Smaili for making this with me. Watch the journey below and tell me what you think.
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JUMP IN LA — no plane ticket, just a keyboard.
A bored creator clicks "Join Challenge"… and the challenge takes him literally. He shrinks down onto his own keyboard, and the only way out is to jump key by key until the screen reads CAPCUT WORLD LA CHALLENGE. One last leap, the monitor flares, and he's pulled through the light, landing in a golden beam in the middle of CapCut World LA to a "Welcome" screen, cheers and confetti.
Why a keyboard? It's every creator's real portal. Every project starts with typing, so I turned typing into the journey itself.
100% AI: 9 clips generated in CapCut Video Studio (Seedance 2.0 & Seedance 2.5), then cut, sound-designed and exported in the CapCut timeline. No live footage.
Ever wondered what happens when your late-night editing session goes completely wrong and drops you straight onto a Hollywood red carpet?
When I saw the challenge, I knew I didn't want to do a simple jump-cut into LA. I wanted to tell a mini sci-fi action story about what happens when an ordinary late-night editing session goes completely wrong.
I built a 30-second narrative where a late-night workstation gets sucked through a monitor onto a collapsing glass filmstrip bridge, forcing the character to run for their life straight onto the flashing red carpet at CapCut World LA. I wanted to blend realistic AI world-building with clean editing to show how powerful the combination of Seedance and CapCut Video Studio can be for creative storytelling. Hope you enjoy it!
This is my first attempt, what do you guys?
I built "Mummy's Slipper," a 48-second AI short film about the most Nigerian way to get to CapCut World LA.
The idea came from something every African kid knows: you don't announce a trip to your mum, you ask. So when I proudly tell my mum "I'm going to LA," she doesn't argue. She just takes off her slipper. One throw sends me through the ceiling, and the slipper chases me across the world: into the Sahara with a camel, onto the Eiffel Tower where it pops my umbrella, and into the Atlantic, where I finally stop running and ride it like a surfboard all the way to LA. I crash into the event, smash a chair, smile and say "Thanks, Mummy"... and then a second slipper hits me.
Why this story: the brief asked for the wildest way to arrive, and I wanted something that was funny without needing explanation, but also personal. The flying slipper is a joke millions of people instantly recognise, from Lagos to London, so it travels well online. I kept dialogue to two lines and let the visuals and timing carry the comedy.
I made the whole thing in CapCut Video Studio, using AI-generated reference images and Omni Reference to keep the characters and the slipper consistent across every scene, then edited, sound-designed and exported it in CapCut.
