Jonathan Mercieca
Freelance Video Content Creator
MELITA — a 30-second continuous shot down a single Maltese limestone street, travelling from 1565 to the present day without a cut.
It opens tight on stone. A mason is finishing a Maltese cross carved into a wall, brushing dust out of the grooves. He steps across the lens — and when the frame clears, four and a half centuries begin passing through the same street while the camera keeps pushing forward and never stops.
Knights running toward cannon fire in 1565. Gas lamps, ghonnella and a karrozzin in the 1890s. Rubble and a Spitfire overhead in 1942. Independence bunting and a boy with a football in 1968. Cafe tables and tourists today. Then the camera lifts over the rooftops and Valletta and the Grand Harbour open up in golden light.
Every era change happens behind something physically in the world — cannon smoke, a stone archway, falling plaster dust, a bedsheet on a washing line, the mason's own body. No dissolves, no transitions, nothing added in post.
Built in CapCut Video Studio as a single native 30-second Seedance 2.5 generation, directed entirely through a text prompt with second-by-second timestamp control. No reference images, no stitching, no editing.
Malta has been besieged, occupied, bombed and rebuilt more times than almost anywhere its size. The mason carves his mark and the film walks away from it, straight into everything that came after.
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Living Painting — step inside an old master's canvas
Living Painting transforms the entire camera view — you and everything around you — into a classical Renaissance oil painting come to life. Visible brushstrokes, rich impasto texture, craquelure cracking across the surface, warm gallery lighting and deep chiaroscuro shadows: your portrait, painted by an old master, that has just started moving.
The lens was built entirely in Easy Lens using AI Video Transform, from a single natural-language prompt describing the painting's surface, light and texture in cinematic detail. Getting here was a process: I began with a multi-era "time travel" concept, discovered through iteration that AI Video Transform runs as a single dedicated block — no extra inputs or overlays — and redesigned around that constraint. Rather than diluting one block across five looks, I concentrated everything into the single most striking transformation. The constraint made the lens better.
The result is a one-tap wonder: instantly legible, endlessly snappable, and different for every person and every room it's pointed at.
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Podium — a control room for parallel hackathon submissions
Public Flowstep file link:
https://app.flowstep.ai/file?activeFileId=cc8a3f6e-041a-403e-a03f-025fe94276b3
Description:
Podium is a control room for anyone running more than one hackathon at once. I built it because I was juggling four live challenge deadlines this week — Flowstep, Contra × Squarespace, Envato, Base44 — and kept losing track of which assets I'd already made, which checklist items were done, and how much time I had left on each.
The Dashboard tracks live countdowns and progress across every active challenge. Challenge Detail breaks down each one's actual judging rubric and a submission checklist. The Asset Library keeps reusable brand assets tagged by which challenges have used them, so nothing gets remade from scratch. The Composer drafts the caption and links for the submission itself.
I wired Flowstep into Claude via MCP and used it to make live edits directly to the file rather than working prompt-by-prompt in the UI — several of the refinements in the final build, including the scoring rubric section, were made this way.
It's the tool I wished existed the moment I opened my fourth browser tab this week.
P.S. If you want to try Flowstep yourself: https://link.flowstep.ai/jonathan-mercieca
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Project Title: Delizie Siciliane — Human by Design
Description:
A 20-25 second AI-generated product promo built entirely with Envato's toolkit — video generation, stock audio, and title templates — for Delizie Siciliane, a Sicilian café and bakery in Sliema, Malta.
The project started with hero pastry stills generated in Envato AI. Comparing the two outputs side by side revealed something important: a technically clean, centred shot felt generic, while a warmer, angled version had real character. That comparison led to the core creative decision — recognising that stills weren't the right format for this brief at all. A product promo needs to move. So the entire piece was rebuilt in motion, with every shot generated to match the voiceover script line by line.
Tools used:
Envato AI (video generation, stock music, title templates, voiceover)
Final Cut Pro X (final assembly and grade)
Human by Design moment:
Comparing two AI-generated hero shots — one clean and centred, one warm and imperfect — and using that comparison to make a bigger call: switching the entire promo from stills to full motion video, matched shot-for-shot to the script.
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