🎬 My first YouTube video is live. Here's what I got wrong.

Happy Sunday folks!

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Big milestone this week. More than 5,000 parents now visit this site every month 🤩. Most of them come looking for honest answers about AI tools for their kids. This week I started giving them those answers in a new format.

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In this week’s email:

• 🎬 My first YouTube video is live — a WordLab review and what I learned making it
• 🏎️ Conor’s favourite Hot Wheel, on the grass, transformed into a full-sized supercar and why the first version made him cry
• 🙋🏻‍♂️ What’s coming next, and a question for you

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🎬 The first video is live

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I've been putting this off for a while. This week I stopped putting it off.

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​Watch: WordLab Review — AI Vocab Games for Kids​

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It’s a 3-minute review of WordLab, the vocabulary game app I built for the site.

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I filmed it, cut it, added motion graphics, and put it together using a pipeline I’d never used before (with a little help from AI of course 😄).

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Is it perfect? No. The sound could be better. The pacing in a couple of spots is a bit off. But it’s done, it’s live, and I learned more making that one video than I could have from reading about it for a month.

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The reason I’m investing in video is straightforward: it’s the medium most parents actually consume. A written review tells you what a tool does but a video review brings it to life and should be more useful to you.

Definitely need to smile more in the next one!

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I’m going to try to ship one video a week alongside the newsletter. The setup is getting better each time. Bear with me while I figure out the sound.

🏎️ Conor’s favourite Hot Wheel. On the grass. Full-sized.

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Conor is 4. He has a Hot Wheels car called the Dragon Blaster. Teal body, pink wings, chrome engine. He carries it everywhere.

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This week I put it on the grass in the garden and used AI to turn it into a full-sized supercar. Same car. Same garden. Same trampoline in the background. Just 50 times bigger.

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The workflow used three tools: Nano Banana 2 to generate the life-sized end frame, Kling 3.0 to animate the transformation, and Gemini to fix a lighting mismatch on the first attempt (the AI gave the car golden hour sunshine while the garden was overcast, it looked like a sticker).

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The first version came out well. Technically clean. Conor watched it but then he started crying which is not the reaction I was expecting! It was because he wasn’t in it.

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So I rebuilt the sequence with a first-person POV shot — he throws the car, the camera follows it to the grass, the transformation happens. His version. He loved it!

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Twenty minutes of total work. The full step-by-step, with every prompt, is on the site.

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​Read the full guide →​

The next two videos I’m planning:

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• NotebookLM: I've done a few family projects on this recently so I'm going to do a walk through of the tool and how we have used it. Turns out it’s one of the most useful things I’ve found for curious primary school kids.

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• Synthesis Tutor: is it worth paying for vs Khan Academy? We’ve been testing it in our house for a few weeks now and the answer is more nuanced than I expected.

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One question before I go: I have a long list of tools and topics to cover, but I’d rather make the content you actually want to watch.

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Reply and tell me: is there a tool, a topic, or an “can AI do X?” question you’ve been curious about? If enough people ask for the same thing, it jumps to the front of the queue.

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That's it for this week. Have a great rest of your weekend!

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Niall (AI Dad Lab)

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