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I challenged myself to create a peaceful cinematic journey of a dragonfly exploring a tranquil swamp using @Envato AI. This is a game trailer promo video.
The interesting part wasn't getting AI to generate beautiful visuals—it did that quickly. The real creative work was in the decisions I made along the way.
My "Human by Design" moment came when I realized the story didn't feel right. The visuals were beautiful, but the AI kept introducing cinematic tension and suspense. That wasn't the emotion I wanted.
So I changed direction.
I refined the prompts to preserve visual continuity across every scene, guided the dragonfly through calm reed mazes instead of dramatic encounters, and replaced the tense soundtrack with gentle birdsong, rustling reeds, and soft wetland ambience. Every prompt became less about generating content and more about directing an experience.
The final piece isn't just an AI-generated video—it's a reflection of hundreds of small creative decisions about mood, pacing, atmosphere, and storytelling.
AI generated the frames.
I shaped the feeling.
That's what "Human by Design" means to me.
I used Envato SoundGen feature to shape the ambience and pace. Envato VideoGen for the visuals with some of my reference images.
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For the Contra x Envato Challenge, 'Human by Design', we built a brand identity and animated a promo video for 'Olo', an accessible crypto-trading platform.
To us, the core of this challenge wasn't about creating more content with AI, but about maintaining one clear creative direction. When drawing from a massive library of separate AI generations, stock footage, fonts, and music, a project can easily turn into a disjointed visual mess. Envato served as our entire toolkit - from AI-generated audio and assets to stock templates and typography.
But every asset still had to answer one crucial question: 'Does this truly feel like Olo'? Guided by the brand promise of making crypto trading accessible for everyone, everywhere, human instinct drove the entire creative process:
1. Curating over generating: Rejecting raw AI outputs that felt flat or out of context and ruthlessly filtering for what actually worked.
2. Building a visual identity: Applying custom effects to transform generic stock footage into a unified aesthetic.
3. Directing the flow: Motion design, precise typography, and timing every single movement to the rhythm of the music in After Effects. Envato Stock and AI tools dramatically accelerate the build process, but it’s the human creator who infuses the soul. It provides the ingredients, but art direction, taste, and instinct define the quality of the final result.
Toolkit: Envato (Envato AI, Stock, Fonts, Audio) + After Effects & Adobe Illustrator.
Brand DesignCreative Design Motion DesignAdobe After EffectsEnvatoenvatochallengeaftereffectsbranding
Nice🔥
Giving a fresh feel to my client's website with @Envato at the forefront of my workflow. 👩🎨🍋
Combining my client's brand design and creative assets from Envato, I animated the product using Envato's AI toolkit.
AI is still falling short on delivering a stand alone hero-section-ready output, this is where the human creativity comes in.
AI video was good but flat so I layered in depth, image and texture I got from Envato, giving it fresh, creative, brand-aligned look the raw AI output could not deliver.
Is "technically good", "actually good"?
I think it's a distinction AI can't tell. What do you think?
See the full workflow and the part AI can't deliver in the video. 🎬
Agree with the distinction. Technically good usually means the output is coherent and error free, actually good means it fits the brand and makes the client's product feel like theirs. That second part is still very much a taste call, not something a model can judge for itself yet.
Designed 3 posters for a local bar's Sunday jam nights, with Envato as my toolkit. 🎸🎤
Envato gave me hero images, background texture, and animated video. But none of it works on its own. Someone still has to make the calls.
Human by Design: AI got me fast raw material. Making it feel like this bar took real decisions - recoloring and chroma-keying a stock video before animating, chasing a grimy texture over a clean AI render, picking one generated scene out of several for its energy - then building the composition and type myself.
Toolkit: @Envato Elements, Envato AI, After Effects, Illustrator.
this is awesome dina!! love the designs