THE PAPER BOAT: one page, the whole island 📄⛵

Primary effect: Bring your own effect – a pack of 11 paper transitions (custom GLSL shaders + a cut-out boat layer)

A girl near Ella tears one page from her school book, folds a boat and sets it in the monsoon drain. It travels down the Mahaweli to the sea at Trincomalee, where a boy unfolds it: "Hello from Ella ☺". Then he folds his own boat and sends it back.

Because the hero is paper, every cut is paper too, and each one fits its scene. The frame TEARS as she tears the page. The boat sails across and its WAKE opens the next shot. The page CURLS into the waterfall, then DROPS and SPLASHES into the paddy. It squeezes into ACCORDION pleats, and night soaks in like INK. The frame opens like a LETTER at sunrise, a WAVE carries us to the beach, the letter UNFOLDS, and its corners FOLD into a new boat.

The idea came from my childhood: making paper boats in the monsoon drains and wondering how far they'd go.

PROCESS NOTE Starting footage: everything was generated inside invideo.

Reference sheets and keyframes: Nano Banana Pro, so the girl, boy and boat stay consistent

12 clips: VEO 3.1 Fast

The sailing boat: cut out with Bria BG Remove

9 paper and water sound effects: ElevenLabs SFX

Music: "Inspiring Childish Hope" from invideo's stock library

What I asked the agent: I connected invideo's MCP server to Claude and directed the build. The first version used the same Origami Fold on every cut, which felt repetitive, so I asked for a different transition for each scene, plus a real paper boat that sails across and opens the next shot with its wake. It wrote 11 custom shader transitions straight onto the timeline, each with its own controls: Page Tear, Origami Fold, Boat Wake Wipe, Page Curl, Drop + Splash, Accordion Pleats, Ink Bleed, Petal Unfold, Wave Wipe, Letter Unfold and Corner Fold. It also keyframed the cut-out boat in sync with the wake and put a sound effect on every cut. X post - https://x.com/isumenuka/status/2108861018583765149?s=20

What I refined:

The wake read like a flat wipe, so I widened it (0.3 → 0.45) and made the boat bigger (0.36 → 0.48).

The curl was a thin sliver, so I raised the radius