What I made my mom for Mother's Day
Every year it's the same thing. Group text fires up two weeks before Mother's Day. Someone proposes a bracelet. Someone counters with a necklace. Everyone Venmos $50 and signs the card. Mom smiles. The bracelet goes in the drawer with the other ones. I didn't want to do it again. Three years ago I made her a video instead. Clips of us talking about memories, photos, the whole thing. She loved it. So this year I pitched something bigger. An original song. Built from our actual stories about her. Style of Josh Groban meets Backstreet Boys' Perfect Fan, because if you're going to swing, swing. Texted my siblings on April 20. Asked for memories, photos, video clips. Anything they had. Crickets. Got most of it by May 8. Still missing one sibling's stuff as of this morning. Mother's Day is tomorrow. So I winged it. Here's what I keep coming back to. Two things drove this whole project. Who it was for. And the source material I had to work with. That's it. Everything else was secondary. The visuals were a mess. Photos in every aspect ratio you can imagine. Old phone videos. Random screenshots. I didn't fix any of it. Didn't matter. The song and the message carried it. Three years ago I made a similar video and used Pink's "Raise Your Glass" as the backing track. YouTube flagged it for copyright. The thing I made for my family got buried because the song wasn't mine. This year I didn't think about copyright once. The song is original. Built from our actual stories. It's mine to share, mine to keep, mine to send to whoever I want. That's the unlock. Not that AI made it faster or cheaper. That it made it mine. Same approach I use for the film ads. Audience first. Source material second. Then build. This time the audience was my mom. The source material was 30 years of stories from my siblings. The film was the gift. That's what OnlyDans AI is. Builders using AI to make stuff that actually means something. Films, songs, content, tools. Whatever you're trying to build.