What a 75-second pilot cost

How it was made

An agent produced the pilot under a budget the founder granted: $15 of OpenRouter, plus 8,000 ElevenLabs credits for the voices, the music and the sound (series/tour-du-monde/PROVENANCE.md). It drew the three characters and two places, then the first frame of every shot. Before paying for a single second of video it held those frames under the voices and cut them into an animatic with ffmpeg, to check the rhythm, at no cost.

1. 
   Shot 01
2. 
   Shot 02
3. 
   Shot 03
4. 
   Shot 04
5. 
   Shot 05
6. 
   Shot 06
7. 
   Shot 07
8. 
   Shot 08
9. 
   Shot 09
10. 
    Shot 10
11. 
    Shot 11
12. 
    Shot 12
13. 
    Shot 13
14. 
    Shot 14
15. 
    Shot 15
16. 
    Shot 16
17. 
    Shot 17

Then seventeen shots: eight with Hailuo 3 Max, seven with Kling 3.0 Pro for the action, two with Wan 2.7, lip-synced to the voices.

What was redone, and why

Two other agents reviewed the shots. Two shots were taken again: in the umbrella shot, Hailuo drew a straight wooden handle instead of the golden crook; in the shot on the platform, Kling grew the handle back in Fogg’s hand and wrote letters on the carriage. Five smaller defects were trimmed away at no cost. After the review of the master, one more shot was redone — the clock hand never reached its red mark — with a new keyframe and a Kling take.

What stays open

• No person is recorded as keeping a shot: the reviews were an agent’s. Nothing on this page is marked Kept.
• The provenance writes keyframes as $1.82; the twenty-five records add up to $1.828148. The total, $12.12, agrees.
• The 74.9-second master is not in the studio’s checkout, so it is not shown. Nothing of the pilot was published.