🎬 19 scenes. 1 duvet. One question from my 6 year old ate my weekend.

Happy Saturday folks!

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This one's landing a day late. I got pulled into the most involved family project I've ever done and I didn't want to send it half-finished. It started with one small Easter experiment and turned into something much bigger.

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In this week’s email:

• The Easter bunny my 6 year old drew that came to life in 30 seconds
• The 1:48 animated film I built from my kids’ favourite picture book, in first person
• An honest review of the AI tool behind both (with the safety caveats parents need)

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🐰 My 6 year old drew the Easter bunny. Then he started running around.

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Before their Easter egg hunt last Sunday, I got my three kids to draw pictures of the Easter bunny. My 6 year old took it seriously. Hers was, objectively, very good.

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So I took a photo of it, dropped it into Grok Imagine, and asked for a '10 second clip of the bunny running around delivering eggs'. Thirty seconds of processing later, her drawing was moving. She lost it.

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That's her actual drawing, animated. No extra detail added, no cleanup. I just fed the photo to Grok and told it what I wanted to happen.

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Which is a small moment. But it's the same trick I spent my weekend using on something much bigger...

🎬 Animating my kids' favourite picture book in first person

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My 3 and 6 year old are obsessed with one of Julia Donaldson's picture books right now. They ask for it every night.

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A few weeks ago my 6 year old started asking what Jonty was thinking at different points in the story. The book is told in third person, so we never quite get inside his head. She wanted to know how he felt at the scariest moments, and what he was thinking when things finally worked out.

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That gave me an idea. What if I rebuilt the whole story from the character's point of view, as a short animated film?

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I've spent a few hours over the last two days doing exactly that.

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The narration is the character's internal monologue, 18 words per scene, read at a gentle pace so every picture has room to land. I recorded it myself on my iPhone, under a duvet 😄 for the acoustics. Hence the subject line.

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I finally finished it this afternoon and had the kids watch it on the sofa with my wife. They immediately asked to watch it again. Here it is:

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The full guide is up on the site with every tool, every prompt, the mistakes I made, and what I'd do differently next time.

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​Read the full guide →

🎨 Grok Imagine: the tool behind both

The workhorse for this was Grok Imagine, xAI's new image-to-video model. It's the best one I've tested for animating picture book illustrations. You upload a still, write a short motion prompt, and get a 6 or 10 second clip back with native audio. Character consistency holds up better than anything else I've tried at this price point.

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It's also attached to some real problems. Common Sense Media has flagged the wider Grok product as not safe for teens, and the Imagine interface has a Spicy🌶️ mode sitting next to the family-friendly ones. Treat it as a parent-operated tool. You generate the clips. Your kids watch the finished video. Never hand them the app.

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There's a 3-day free trial of SuperGrok that's generous enough to build a full project on. After that it's $30/month.

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​Read the full review →​

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That's it for this week!

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Have a great rest of your weekend.

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Niall (AI Dad Lab)

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P.S. If you try the first-person trick with one of your kids' favourite books, hit reply and tell me how it went. I'd love to know which book you picked.