Animated video pipeline
Animated Horror
Hindi horror stories, fully animated, publishing as Andheri Dastak. Give the pipeline a premise and get back a finished film. Twenty-five shots, coherent characters, and it renders for under a dollar. The channel is live on YouTube.
- Output
- ~2:30 animated shorts, 25 shots, Hindi narration (an English folk-horror variant is in progress)
- Status
- Live on YouTube
- Compute
- Rented consumer GPUs (RTX 5090s on Salad), spun up per render, torn down after
- Cost
- Under $1 for a four-minute film
How a story becomes a film
- Script A local language model writes the screenplay. Beats, shots, camera notes, and a reference description for every character.
- Character sheets Krea 2 or Z-Image generates the cast once, so every face stays the same across the whole film.
- Keyframes Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 poses those character sheets into each of the 25 shots. Same person, new scene, every time.
- Animation Wan 2.2, a 14-billion-parameter image-to-video model, brings each keyframe to life. It runs quantized with LightX2V LoRAs inside ComfyUI, on rented consumer 5090s that the pipeline spins up and destroys per render.
- Finish Real-ESRGAN upscales the clips and RIFE interpolates them to a smooth 24fps.
- Sound LTX 2.3 watches the video and generates matching foley. ElevenLabs makes the effects. Narration comes through Google's TTS API, and WhisperX aligns the subtitles word by word.
What it costs
A four-minute animated film renders for under a dollar. A studio quotes thousands for the same minutes, and the cheap way to fake it is to let quality collapse. So the cost is the engineering. Every model in the chain is open weights running on rented consumer GPUs that exist only for the length of a render, the expensive steps are quantized and LoRA-accelerated instead of brute-forced, and the pipeline resumes rather than re-renders when something fails. Under a dollar is the number that makes a channel like this possible at all.
Watch
YouTube, @AndheriDastak. Same philosophy as The Footnote, the history channel this grew out of, in a different genre.