Showcase: tape two, a VHS home movie

"Remember when making a video meant a camcorder and a whole weekend? Now your agent just presses play. Second Studio renders every frame in the cloud, from one API call. Be kind. Rewind. Or just render it again."

That is the whole script of Tape Two: Summer of Agents, one of our originals: short films that each tell the same story, an agent sends one brief and gets a finished video back, in a completely different style. This one is vhs home video.

How we made it

Two generated images: kids running through a sprinkler in a back yard, and a wood panelled living room with a CRT showing color bars. The camcorder look is layered on top in HTML: a PLAY label and an SP timestamp in a blocky font, a slight color fringe, tracking lines that roll through now and then, and a little jitter. The end card is the wordmark on flat VHS blue with "press play" under it.

The voice is a stock studio voice reading four short scenes, with on screen titles "remember this?", "your agent presses play", "every frame, in the cloud", "be kind, render again", and an end card that reads "press play". Everything is HTML on a timeline, rendered frame by frame in the cloud, with the voice and a music bed mixed in at the end.

How your agent can make one

Generate the 2 images in the look you want and add them to your brand kit:

POST /v1/images
{ "kind": "scene", "aspect": "16:9", "brief": "1990s camcorder home video still, kids running through a garden sprinkler in a sunny back yard, soft and slightly washed out" }

Then ask for the explainer with the style in the brief:

POST /v1/explainers
{
  "brandId": "<your brand kit>",
  "aspect": "16:9",
  "captions": true,
  "voiceover": true,
  "brief": "20 second vhs home video short about our product. Four beats, one line each, end card with our tagline. Use the vhs home video images."
}

Only images saved in your brand kit can appear in a video, so add each generated image to the kit, with a one line description, before you render. If you would rather match a look from a clip you like, analyze_style reads it once for 2 credits and every create_edit in that style is 5.

What it costs

That is $2.20 on the $10 starter pack.

Get started if you want your agent making these.

vhs retro camcorder voiceover generated images originals