Brendan Glover | Built Different

A friend needed a product video for their custom steel and timber furniture business — and we wanted to see if we could pull it off without spending a single cent. Here's exactly how it went. The Brief A friend of mine runs a small business making custom steel-framed furniture with dark-stained timber panels. Beautiful stuff — raw, industrial, built by hand. They needed a product video. Nothing crazy, just something cinematic enough to use on social media and their website. The problem: no budget. No camera crew. No studio. So instead of doing it the normal way, I decided to test something. Could we use free AI tools — with clever prompting and some patience — to generate a full cinematic video sequence from scratch? The answer, as it turns out, is yes. And here's exactly how we did it. The Stack (All Free) Claude (claude.ai) — creative direction, shot list, and every single prompt Google AI Studio — text-to-image generation (Imagen / Nano Banana) Google Flow ...

I didn't set out to build a web app. I was trying to figure out how to space flat bars evenly across a welding table frame. Simple enough problem — take your total frame width, subtract the bar widths, divide the remaining space by the number of gaps. Except every time I tried to do it in my head or on a calculator, I'd lose track of what I was doing, second-guess myself, and end up measuring twice anyway. I Googled it. Nothing useful came up. There were forum posts with someone's handwritten formula in the comments, a few Excel spreadsheets from 2009, and a lot of people saying "just measure it out on the floor." Not exactly what I was looking for. So I built the thing myself. What GapCalc Actually Is GapCalc is a free, browser-based workshop calculator built for welders, fabricators, and makers. No login. No app to download. No paywalls. You open it on your phone in the workshop, and it works. It started as one calculator — the Gap Calculator — which does exactl...