AI Is Finally Making Small Projects Profitable - Here’s How

For years, I dove into the deep end of trying to create studio-quality imagery. I took years of classes in college, then online, trying to master the executional tools as much as training my eyes. Now, with AI redefining the creative landscape, being a designer on the box feels like it's declining in value. This feels sad for everyone who spent time building those skillsets....but the benefits for agency owners are huge. Affordable creative work is now within reach without the legacy time and energy demands of producing polished animation. 

The AI Advantage

I view every new project as a chance to impress. A professor at Pratt Institute once told me, "Your work is your worth. If the work is good, the money will follow." This mantra has often led me to invest more hours than budgets justified. But now, AI creative tools are showing me a new way forward.

Initially, tight deadlines and limited budgets nudged me toward AI. 

Currently, I just signed a project with a tight budget. Decent for what it is, but I still need to be very strategic about who I hire. I took a step back and thought about how I could approach this to keep my overhead on this project below 50%.

AI Tools in Action

Storyboarding: During a recent flight, I drafted a storyboard in mere minutes using LTX Studio. Total time? 15 minutes. I'm usually skeptical of claims like this but it's true.  Although not perfect, these AI-generated images gave me a strong foundation, with a huge range of images. It's a massive time saver, and I love that it generates options. AI is terrible at getting you precisely what you want when you want it, but out of 50 choices you can find one that's damn close. 

Styleframes:
In the past, creating styleframes basically meant creating the finished product sans animation. Or tedious resource collecting to collage pieces of images you like. This sucked. It wasn't a true representation of what you wanted. The only way to get a true styleframe (a final still image of an animation in the pre-production phase) is to build the entire project. 

This is all now seriously streamlined thanks to Control Nets in ComfyUI. With LoRAs, Scribble, Open Pose, Canny-Hard Edge Detection, Depth, and other tools, I can control and blend reference styles really fast. What used to take hours now takes about an hour, freeing me from the tedious process of piecing together tons of images from the internet. In a controlled way, you can target what you like about your reference and yet completely transform how it looks. It's still frustrating and random, but you can get stuff that looks good fast, which at this point in the process is what builds momentum and gets clients exciteda about working together. 

Animating with AI

AI video is not yet cinema-ready, but it opens doors for web-exclusive work I previously would turn down. Sure, it isn't easy to get a true HD video. It's weird paying to generate clips. Without AOVs or 32 bit imagery, the flexibility in post-production is almost zero. But web-only projects that I might have turned down in the past now can still come out cool without me working ovetime on a passion project. 

I discussed my 3D workflow for this last week. You can animate the motion  in 3D and transfer your style on top, but even just animating stills using text-to-video can give great results if you're patient. For for low-budget projects, just prompting animations on top of your styleframes in Kling can turn out great results. (At least until they have super specific notes) 

It's clear to me how AI is transforming small projects into viable opportunities. I'm wary of a world where faster deadlines and lower budgets come with it, but as we live through the front lines of that transition...it turns out it's opening some doors too.