I turned my whole life into a cartoon with AI. Here's how.

If you looked at my About page, you saw a little film: me as a baby in 1968, growing up through Pong, Walkmans, and dial-up, and ending as an AI superhero, because at 58 I am building more than ever. I am not an animator. I made the whole thing with AI tools in an afternoon, and the how is the whole point.

The character came first

The hard part of any character animation is keeping the character consistent across every scene. I generated a few cartoon versions of myself in different tools, then picked the one that looked most like me and most like this site: flat, bold outlines, a hard offset shadow. I made it in ChatGPT. That single image became my reference for everything else.

Then I used it to generate each era: baby me in 1968, kid me with an Atari, teenage me with a Walkman, all the way to today. The trick is feeding that same reference image every single time, so the character never drifts into a stranger.

Making it move

I turned the stills into short clips with Kling, an image-to-video tool. I learned one rule the hard way: it can only animate what is already in the picture. Feed it a plain photo and ask for a cape, and it will invent a brand-new superhero that looks nothing like you. So I generated the superhero frame first, cape and all, then simply asked for the cape to flutter.

Putting it together

I stitched the clips in CapCut, which is free, added a music track, and dropped in some sound effects. The first export was 58 megabytes, far too heavy for a website. A little compression later it was under 3, small enough to live here without slowing the page down.

The takeaway

I did not learn animation. I learned how to point a few tools at an idea and keep going until it looked right. None of this takes anything away from real developers, what they build goes deeper and sturdier than anything I can wire together with a prompt, and I respect the craft. It just means you do not need to be one to start. That is the theme of everything on this site: you need the idea, and the stubbornness to wrangle the tools until they give you what you pictured.