Setting Up the Lab

Havoc Labs is turning into an AI video generation lab. That's pretty much the whole pitch.

The actual goal is figuring out the best workflow for making short-form video with AI, and maybe long-form down the line, without overspending to get there. There are a dozen AI video tools out right now and none of them agree on what's cheap versus what's actually good, so a good chunk of this is just going to be trial and error until something repeatable falls out of it.

Short-form first, because it's faster to test and faster to get a read on whether a given tool or workflow is worth using. Long-form is on the table later, once there's a process worth stretching out.

Cost-wise: most of these tools hand out free credits just for signing up, so step one is running the same idea through a handful of them and seeing what comes back. After that it's about picking whatever gives the most bang for the buck — best output per dollar — not just whatever's cheapest or whatever's getting hyped this month. Kling looks like a decent starting point on price, but that's not locked in.

Everything on the post-processing side — cuts, captions, music — stays free regardless: ffmpeg for editing, a self-hosted Whisper for captions, royalty-free tracks for music. No reason to pay for any of that.

So that's the plan: test tools, find the flow that gets the most out of each dollar, and build from whatever wins. First batch of experiments is queued up now — they'll show up on Experiments as they're done.