content · 2026
Shift's Over
Daily animated Shorts about tradespeople and the customers who ruin their day. Every asset runs on my desk — script to post.
Shift's Over is a daily animated Shorts channel about tradespeople and the customers who ruin their day. The cast is twelve recurring Pixar-style 3D characters I built and locked myself — same face, same voice, from the first episode to the ten-thousandth. The pipeline runs entirely on my desk: Flux 2 generates the characters, Wan 2.1 animates the mouths, Kokoro voices every line, and a custom FFmpeg compositor stitches it together with mouth-snap-to-voice timing and karaoke-style captions. Zero API costs per episode, one RTX 5080 doing the whole render farm, seven Shorts a week across YouTube and TikTok. Stories get mined from real trade subreddits and paraphrased into 45-second bits.
- Twelve recurring Pixar-style 3D characters — identity-locked once, reused for every episode forever
- Custom compositor with per-line speaker cuts, mouth-snap-to-audio timing, selfie-cam narrator picture-in-picture, and word-highlight karaoke captions
- Zero per-episode cost — Flux 2, Wan 2.1, Kokoro TTS, WhisperX, and FFmpeg all running local on one RTX 5080
- Reddit story miner plus LLM script generator plus auto-publisher to YouTube Shorts and TikTok, orchestrated end to end
- Daily loop runs unattended; I only touch thumbnails
- ComfyUI
- Flux 2
- Wan 2.1
- Kokoro TTS
- WhisperX
- FFmpeg
Photoreal lip-sync models paint literal rainbow noise on Pixar mouths. Learned that the hard way.
