Recently I came across this video.

It’s a voiceover story about Frank Sinatra. 140,000 views in one month. About 17 minutes long.

What’s the story about? There’s a small Italian restaurant in New York that Sinatra used to visit—to feel like an ordinary person, so no one would bother him, ask for autographs, or treat him like a celebrity. One evening, a young waitress sat down at the piano and sang. He liked her performance and helped her become a singer. That’s it.

The video includes a couple of animated shots, but overall it’s illustrated with a few static, repeated images. Still—140,000 views, not bad at all.

Why such success? Because of the story? Of course not. The whole point is that for the entire runtime, it keeps going on and on about what a great man Sinatra was. It reminded me of that old joke about Lenin in the bathroom—urinating, just like a regular human being.

Replace Sinatra in that story with a fictional famous singer—no way such a trivial story would get that many views.

But as GPT explained to me, a video needs a hook that keeps viewers watching past the first 30 seconds. In this case, that hook is Sinatra himself.

So I decided to try making a narrated video too, illustrated with static images. Especially since my free credits for generating videos in Grok ran out, and I’m at a crossroads about which AI tool to invest in next.

So I did it. I have a short story about a boy who brings a turkey home to his mother for Thanksgiving. Just five and a half minutes long. But the hook? Where do you get one? Real life doesn’t come with hooks.

Still, I gave it a shot—the mother thinks the boy stole it, but actually… well, you can see for yourself.