My Feet Keep<br>Filing Complaints
A Making-Of Study

My Feet Keep
Filing Complaints

How one tired guy, a nervous system, and a raccoon in a hard hat got made — start to finish.

Stop-motion clay 9:16 60 seconds AI pipeline

Start with the final output

Watch it first

64s · vertical 9:16 · clay look · raccoon reveal at the halfway mark

My Feet Keep Filing Complaints — Making-Of

What it is

The idea in one breath

A perpetually tired 52-year-old narrates, deadpan, about his feet acting up at 3am.

Under his skin is a literal city. The power grid is run by an overwhelmed raccoon in a yellow hard hat, yanking levers, drowning in complaints.

That raccoon reveal is the whole reason the piece works. Everything before it is setup. Everything after is payoff.

Neuropathy, retold Deadpan comedy Suburban realism

The hero shot: SB021

My Feet Keep Filing Complaints — Making-Of

The whole pipeline, one picture

Script → frames → motion → film

LOCK
script + VO
→
STORYBOARD
36 panels
→
DESIGN BOARDS
7 locked refs
→
HERO FRAMES
Gemini stills
→
ANIMATE
frame → clip
→
ASSEMBLE
VO + captions
→
REVIEW
on a phone

The one rule that makes it work

Lock the script and voiceover before you generate a single image. Every time that got skipped, the visuals had to be redone when a line changed. Audio first, structure second, pretty pictures last.

The second rule

Continuity comes from references, not luck. One locked style block plus the design boards ride on every frame, so the man, the room, and the raccoon never drift.

My Feet Keep Filing Complaints — Making-Of
The process, step by step

Seven steps

Lock · Storyboard · Boards · Frames · Animate · Assemble · Review

Step 1 of 7

Lock the script and the voiceover

Fourteen voiceover lines. Nothing visual happens until these are final.

  • Voice-first. The cut is driven by the audio, not the other way around.
  • Synthesized with ElevenLabs ("Brian," 0.9x pace), but any TTS works.
  • The lines decide the beats. The beats decide the shots.

"But under the skin it's a city, and the power grid's run by a raccoon."

Why it matters

A VO cache keyed by beat index desynced audio every time beats moved. Lock the lines, key the cache by text, and the churn stops.

My Feet Keep Filing Complaints — Making-Of

Step 2 of 7

Storyboard — 36 panels, batch-sheet method

Act 1 — the wake-up

Built in ChatGPT image gen. The trick: generate a whole sheet of 12 panels in one image, not 12 separate ones. One render keeps the same face, room, and light across the sheet.

Three sheets of 12 = 36 panels. Sheet 2 matches sheet 1, sheet 3 matches sheet 2.

Three golden rules

  • Continuity. Same man, same room. Lamp + clock + water camera-left, never move the bed.
  • Every panel a different shot. Break human shots with inserts (just the foot, just the clock).
  • No raccoon before SB021. The reveal has to be earned.
My Feet Keep Filing Complaints — Making-Of

Step 3 of 7

Design boards — the continuity anchors

Seven locked reference images. These ride on every frame as conditioning, so nothing drifts. This is the actual secret.

The guy

The raccoon

Control room

Nerve city

Style ref

Portrait-only. Feed the model a landscape reference and it forces a landscape output — three regens learned that the hard way.

My Feet Keep Filing Complaints — Making-Of

Step 4 of 7

Hero frames — one locked still per beat

Each beat rendered as a native 9:16 still on Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, conditioned on the design boards. Picked because it does "same character, new shot" best.

Every prompt = the same locked blocks + the one thing that changes (the shot):

  • Style block — clay look, fingerprints, 3am blue + amber.
  • Continuity — lamp left, wife right, never move the bed.
  • Negatives — no text, no glossy CGI, no Pixar polish.

Swap models by editing one function. Prompts and batching stay put.

wake-up · nerve city · raccoon · floor-is-lava

My Feet Keep Filing Complaints — Making-Of

Step 5 of 7

Animate — turn each still into motion

The shape is always: a heavy start frame (carries the whole look) + a tiny motion prompt (one verb, no camera move). One shot per clip, 2–4 seconds. Three ways to do it:

Route A

Higgsfield

Copy and paste, no code. Drop the still as the start frame, paste the style block + an end-frame line, let it interpolate the motion. Full manual control.

Route B

ByteDance / Seedance API

Claude holds the key and drives it. Posts the job, polls, downloads, strips audio, assembles. Fully automated. ~135s and ~109k tokens per 5s clip.

Route C

A Claude connector

Only Canva generates images today, and it's for graphics, not film frames. The real "Claude makes it" path is Route B.

"Obvious claymation, not a real person" clears the model's realistic-human safety filter. AI video is dice — roll, check, roll again until usable.

My Feet Keep Filing Complaints — Making-Of

Worked example · part 1

The raccoon reveal — from prompt to still

SB021.png — the hero still

Step 1 — generate the still (Gemini, conditioned on the design boards)
[ locked style block ] Stop-frame clay animation, handmade clay characters with visible fingerprints, warm practical lighting, dark blue shadows, amber practical lights, grounded suburban realism, deadpan comedy. THE RACCOON: tiny clay utility worker, dark gray fur, scratched yellow hard hat, oversized utility belt, frantic, overwhelmed. SHOT: Full raccoon reveal. A cramped control room inside the nervous system — consoles, gauges, a complaints board, amber light. Negative: no text, no glossy CGI, no Pixar polish.

That still is now the start frame. Next, it gets paste into Higgsfield to move. →

My Feet Keep Filing Complaints — Making-Of

Worked example · part 2

Paste into Higgsfield — make it move

Step 2 — start frame = the still · then paste this
A · Style block (prepend every shot)Native vertical 9:16, stop-frame clay animation, visible fingerprints, miniature practical sets, warm tungsten + 3am blue, 35mm film grain, amber practical lights, deadpan. THE RACCOON: dark gray fur, scratched yellow hard hat, oversized utility belt, overwhelmed. Negative: no text, no glossy CGI, no Pixar polish, no neon.
B · End-frame line (where the shot lands)SB021-end — Full raccoon reveal complete, yellow hard hat catching the amber light, utility belt swinging, overwhelmed mid-turn.

The move

Drop SB021.png as the start frame. Paste A, then B. Higgsfield interpolates the gap — the raccoon turns and the hat catches the light.

Full style block + every end-frame line live in the kit: prompts/MASTER-PROMPTS.md and 03-VIDEO.md.

My Feet Keep Filing Complaints — Making-Of

Step 6 of 7

Assemble — VO, captions, export

Clips go in order, the locked voiceover syncs on top, captions burn from that same VO, export 9:16.

  • Animatic from stills first, get rhythm signed off, THEN one video pass. Stills lock structure cheaply.
  • Salvage before re-roll. Trimming around an artifact costs nothing; re-generating costs tokens.
  • Sharp still + simple motion for static or detailed beats — Seedance softens detail.
  • Always export with +faststart and a new filename. Never overwrite an open file.

The proven recipe

Heavy still + tiny motion prompt + portrait-only refs + "Aardman, not a real person" + a QA gate on every frame. One shot per clip.

My Feet Keep Filing Complaints — Making-Of

Step 7 of 7

Review — approve from a phone

The current cut and the frames go on one lean web page. Open it on a phone, approve or send notes in one tap. No screen-share, no texting files.

Rules that kept it working

  • Keep it lean — one video, a few frames. An overloaded page got so heavy it loaded blank.
  • Version the URL — a fresh path per cut so the phone never shows a stale version.
  • No-cache headers — or the phone keeps serving the old cut.

Frames grouped by act so you scan continuity across a whole sheet

My Feet Keep Filing Complaints — Making-Of
What the 33 versions taught us

Lessons learned

33 cuts. 106 seconds of mush became 64 tight seconds.

The method: block a rough skeleton end to end, then layer pass after pass on top until the feel is right — the same way animation is built.

Lessons learned

The complaints that ate the most cycles

ComplaintTimesThe fix that worked
Blurry / low-res6+Start from genuinely sharp stills; sharp still + simple motion for static beats
Shoes / barefoot5"Wearing shoes" + a footwear check on every clothed shot
Video artifacts4Trim around the error before re-rolling
Continuity breaks4Anchor every frame to a real established frame or board
Anatomy errors3Extreme-simple framing; edit from a clean frame
Stale cache4Versioned URLs + no-store headers

Most re-do rounds were things a 20-second QA check would have caught: identity, shoes, anatomy, aspect ratio, sharpness, continuity.

My Feet Keep Filing Complaints — Making-Of

Lessons learned

What actually moved the quality

Voice-first

Lock the VO to the final script before touching visuals. Stopped the audio-mismatch churn cold.

Stills, then one video pass

Animatic from stills locks structure and rhythm cheaply. Spend video generation only where motion earns it.

Salvage before re-roll

A trim costs nothing. A re-roll costs tokens and time. Reach for the trim first.

Beat the safety filter

Heavy "obvious claymation, Aardman, not a real person" prompting clears the realistic-human flag.

Lean, versioned review

One video, a few frames, a fresh URL per cut. Feedback became one tap.

References over luck

Portrait-only design boards on every frame. Continuity inherited, not re-rolled.

My Feet Keep Filing Complaints — Making-Of

The result

From mush to tight

106s first rough
→
64s final cut
33 versions
36 panels
14 VO lines

The resigned close-up that ends it

Every beat now carries a deliberate image, a deadpan rhythm, and a neuropathy-pointed ending. The raccoon does exactly one job — and does it badly, on purpose.

"I used to be in charge of my feet. I ask them to knock it off. They won't. We just live here."

My Feet Keep Filing Complaints — Making-Of
Your turn

Start your own

The full package — prompts, design boards, scripts, the web review page, and this deck — is yours to fork.

What's in the kit

7 setup + process docs · 36 frame prompts · the prompt bible · 4 generator scripts · 7 design boards · the review web UI · the final film.

Bring your own keys

Ships with no API keys. Copy .env.example to .env, add yours. 00-SETUP-KEYS.md says where to get each one and what it costs.

Read order: 00-SETUP-KEYS → STUDY → 01-STORYBOARD → 02-IMAGES → 03-VIDEO → 04-CONNECTORS → 05-TOOLS-AND-UI