A 7-Minute Trending-News Show for $0.24

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I just published a complete 7-minute, 41-second YouTube news show about what’s trending—produced entirely through a conversation with an AI coding agent using OpenMontage.

▶️ Watch the video on the OpenMontage YouTube channel

The entire production cost approximately $0.24. Using OpenMontage’s local Piper TTS path could reduce the marginal production cost to $0—excluding your existing computer, electricity, and coding-agent subscription.

But the interesting part isn’t merely the price. This was a complete editorial workflow:

Research → story selection → scripting → art direction → footage sourcing → narration → sound mixing → rendering → quality control → vertical derivatives → publishing

Everything was directed conversationally, while OpenMontage managed the production workflow.

Build Something Similar

Copy the prompt below into your AI coding agent with OpenMontage installed:

Expand the complete prompt

Use OpenMontage to produce a polished trending-news video using only zero-cost
or locally available production tools.

Do not use any paid API or asset without asking me first. Open the project in
Backlot so I can follow its progress.


RESEARCH AND APPROVAL

1. Scan today's significant news across technology, science, business, culture,
   sports, and unusual events.

2. Verify every candidate using reliable current sources. Clearly distinguish
   confirmed facts from reports, proposals, preliminary results, rumors, and
   predictions.

3. Present 8–12 candidate stories with:

   - Headline
   - Why it matters now
   - Proposed hook
   - Primary sources
   - Confidence and uncertainty
   - Visual-footage opportunities
   - Any factual or legal risks

4. Stop and let me approve, reject, add, and reorder the exact stories.

   Do not generate narration, download footage, or begin production until I
   approve the final slate and order.


FORMAT

After approval, create:

- One approximately 7–9 minute 16:9 YouTube anthology
- One native 9:16 vertical anthology
- One clean 45–65 second vertical short for every approved story

Treat every story as its own complete short film, even inside the anthology.


STORY DESIGN

For every story:

- Write a conversational narration script of approximately 45–65 seconds.
- Make the recognizable company, person, product, team, or event the first
  spoken subject and the dominant first-frame text.
- Create 10–12 narration-matched visual beats.
- Refresh the visual approximately every 3.5–7 seconds.
- Use at least five footage-led scenes and three distinct moving clips.
- Use free footage from sources such as Pexels, Pixabay, NASA, or Archive.org.
- Burn readable captions into the video.
- Preserve uncertainty qualifiers in the narration and on-screen text.

Give every story a materially different visual world, including its own:

- Color palette
- Typography
- Footage treatment
- Transitions
- Diagrams
- Motion vocabulary