Haunted-house facades are seasonal stills; overlay hours, do not invent ghosts
Lock the exterior you actually built. Timed hours and ticket URL. A generated apparition is a spoiler and a fake.
Lock the exterior you actually built. Timed hours and ticket URL. A generated apparition is a spoiler and a fake.
A haunt clip that can run is a still of this facade — this year’s porch, this maze front, this ticket booth — then a little motion, then the hours as type you typed. It is not a generated ghost. An apparition the model invented is a spoiler for a scare you actually built, and a picture of an event that is not on the lot. Photograph the exterior you control. Animate that. Print tonight’s hours. Leave the dead off the generate.
Lock the facade you built
Booked haunts have permits, paint, and a silhouette a local will recognise. A paragraph that says “scary Victorian at dusk, ghosts in the windows” will mint a cousin house and a crowd you do not have releases for. Frame the real build: same porch, same lighting towers, same banner. Dawn, empty, or staff-only is a legal still. A packed queue of generated kids is not.
Ordinary image-to-video moves that photograph. It does not get to populate the lawn with people, and it does not get to leak the scare. Prompt the travel — slow clouds, practicals already in the still, light on the facade. Stop. “Ghost in the upstairs window” is a spoiler. Keep lips, minors, and apparitions out of the generate.
Event venues is a ballroom and an empty-to-styled transformation. It is not this year’s haunt facade. Do not rewrite that page as a scare house. The job here is a seasonal exterior plus hours.
Image-to-video starts from the approved still. Re-describing “cinematic haunted mansion, fog, screaming extras” is how the model draws a house you do not own. If the still includes a scare through an open door, crop or shoot again. You are selling a ticket, not giving the walk away.
Overlay hours and the ticket URL
Muted autoplay is how these clips get watched. Hours and the ticket URL belong on screen. Speech in the take is optional. The overlay is not.
Type the line from the calendar you actually run. That string changes. The facade should not. A model asked to paint hours onto a generated mansion will eventually write a cousin time.
Add timed text overlays to a video burns several authored lines, each with start_sec / end_sec. Hours, then a named night, then the ticket URL. Font, size, colour, and position apply to the set, not per line. Nothing is transcribed. A mute porch has nothing to listen to. If you only need one persistent badge for the whole clip, that is add a text overlay: one string, whole duration, top / center / bottom.
Crop to the ratio you will ship before you overlay. Top / center / bottom sit in a different safe zone after a 9:16 reframe. Picture lock, then type. Offers and hours change weekly. The facade you built this season does not.
Do not prompt a video model to typeset the URL. Prompted glyphs are a miss you regenerate to fix. Overlay the string you can edit without rebuilding the porch.
Save the edit as a seasonal draft
Most haunt weeks are the same edit with a new hours card. Intro sting, locked facade clip, captions in a fixed style, a middle that is tonight’s times. Do not regenerate the house every Thursday.
Save a video edit as a reusable draft persists the timeline as a cloud EDL: clips, trims, texts, music, captions. save_editor_project writes it. get_editor_project loads the full edl. list_editor_projects returns metadata only — id, title, duration, clip count — cheapest way to find the draft before you load it. Omit the id to fork. Pass the id to update in place.
Swap the hours lines. Keep the facade clip. Save. Render. A draft is project state, not a watchable file. Credits spend when edit_video produces the export. Preview at 480p is the cheap look; the charged export is the ship.
A generate that “writes a new episode” will invent a new house if you let the plot roam. Pin the still. Ghosts stay out of scope. If you needed the identical MP4 every weekday, you wanted a scheduled post of a finished file, not a scheduled generate. New hours on the same porch: keep the porch, change the overlay.
Do not invent ghosts
A generated apparition is two failures at once. It is a fake: a scare that is not on the walk. It is a spoiler: a scare that is on the walk, given away in the ad. Neither is the job. Fog and practicals already in the photograph can move. A model-made ghost cannot.
Do not fill the lawn with generated children so opening night looks busy. Photoreal minors are a likeness problem. Photograph opening with real guests and releases, or keep the still empty-enough and overlay hours.
Do not cast a talking host in a cloak to “explain” the lore. Put a real named actor on camera when someone must speak — or do not speak. Generation can still do the porch.
If a local can name the facade, you locked the right still. If a guest can name the scare, you shipped a spoiler. Print the time. Leave the house as you photographed it.
FAQ
Can we add a generated ghost so the facade looks haunted?
No. An invented apparition is a fake scare or a spoiler of a real one. Photograph the exterior you built. Overlay hours and the ticket URL. Leave the walk for the ticket.
One overlay or timed lines?
One persistent hours badge is a single overlay on the whole file. Hours, then a named night, then a ticket URL is timed overlays, with timestamps you set. Neither job transcribes. Neither job belongs in the generate prompt.
Does saving a draft re-render the haunt every time I change hours?
No. A draft is project state. Swap the overlay lines, save with the same id, then render. Regenerating the facade is a new generate, and it is how the house drifts.
Is /for/event-venues the same job?
No. That page is the venue hub: empty-to-styled rooms. This listing is a seasonal haunt facade: locked exterior, timed hours, reusable draft, no generated ghosts.