This one deserves a little build-focused post on the blog I referenced in the OP. But in summary, it was a frankly shocking roughly 60-minute session with a surprisingly narrow prompt in Claude Code.
I didn't use a cloud environment which is what I typically do on this project. I set it up to use OpenRouter to delegate to appropriate voice model for the narration (which still blows my mind, especially the French version as a native speaker). That cost barely $2 of credits.
The art direction was simply to remain coherent with both the tone and voice of the project but the visual identity and existing design and illustration elements.
All told I think the final cost was around $30 (at API rates) for the both the US English version and the French version. It was much cheaper to French, because it produced reusable HTML, CSS, and JS assets to animate the scenes in the video.
As someone who's done a lot of tedious video editing work and (lousy) motion graphics in the past for some educational content, it both terrified me (for all the hard-working folks who do this for a living) and made me realize how accessible producing this kind of video content is. It's a bit more palatable given the focus of this project, but I know many content producers, video editors & audio engineers (even voice actors!) who likely wouldn't find this exciting at all.
Given this project has no profit motive, I haven't paid artists (or programmers to make this hit home) to contribute to the project but if people find Indigene helpful (outside of me and a few friends) it's something I'd much rather do. I've done that in the past for Keep a Changelog for instance.
alt Hacker News
This one deserves a little build-focused post on the blog I referenced in the OP. But in summary, it was a frankly shocking roughly 60-minute session with a surprisingly narrow prompt in Claude Code.
I didn't use a cloud environment which is what I typically do on this project. I set it up to use OpenRouter to delegate to appropriate voice model for the narration (which still blows my mind, especially the French version as a native speaker). That cost barely $2 of credits.
The art direction was simply to remain coherent with both the tone and voice of the project but the visual identity and existing design and illustration elements.
All told I think the final cost was around $30 (at API rates) for the both the US English version and the French version. It was much cheaper to French, because it produced reusable HTML, CSS, and JS assets to animate the scenes in the video.
As someone who's done a lot of tedious video editing work and (lousy) motion graphics in the past for some educational content, it both terrified me (for all the hard-working folks who do this for a living) and made me realize how accessible producing this kind of video content is. It's a bit more palatable given the focus of this project, but I know many content producers, video editors & audio engineers (even voice actors!) who likely wouldn't find this exciting at all.
Given this project has no profit motive, I haven't paid artists (or programmers to make this hit home) to contribute to the project but if people find Indigene helpful (outside of me and a few friends) it's something I'd much rather do. I've done that in the past for Keep a Changelog for instance.