How Base44’s Apps 2.0 film was made in Plnty

The brief was a film about what people build with Base44 when their own name is on the app. Each person got a world of their own: a woman whose app dresses her from her wardrobe, a pianist building a learning app with a leaderboard, a maker writing the controller for the robot arm on his desk, a woman in a cafe building a breathing app, and a delivery dashboard tracking a fleet.

Every one of them needed a face, clothes, a room and a camera angle before an animator could start. The studio settled all of that on Plnty boards first.

The film opens on paper pages full of typed words. The studio uploaded a clip of those pages, reading “in this world of moving interfaces and fragmented screens”, and changed the words inside the clip three times. First aleph-2 with “Change the text in on the pages to be “From an idea” on each row”, then the same words on Gemini Omni, then “remove the word “screens””. The clean title the film types over the pages was added in the edit.

The film opens on water and moves into its interface through graphic textures, so the look of single shots was tested as carefully as the people. style-transfer took a dark picture of a hand touching a rock pool and gave it the light and color of another picture, keeping the hand, the ripples and the framing. A few passes gave the opening its options, from warm cream to open sky.

The studio gave edit-images one of its pictures and one sentence, “Add a very subtle pixel display effect across the image, as if seen in an extreme close-up of a screen…”, and ran it on three models side by side, GPT Image 2, Nano Banana 2 and Seedream. The film’s pixel grid is Nano Banana 2’s edit. Its thin cursor sits where the edit’s dotted one does, so the film cuts straight from the edit into the typing cursor that ends the opening run of objects.

The studio dressed its characters from their character sheets with one prompt: “Recreate the same character and the same character sheet, changing only the outfit to a {suggest 20 different hipster outfits}”. In Plnty those braces are a variable. Plnty writes the list and runs each line on its own, so one prompt brings the same person back in twenty outfits side by side on the board, or in as many as you want, up to 99 a press.

The fashion creator’s outfit swaps in the mirror were made with video-restyler, and the clothes that walk off her phone with first-last-frame, the flat clothes as the first frame and her shot as the last.

The pianist was cast twice. Seen from the side, the first one read too close to another character, so he was recast with a beard, glasses and a red work jacket, and that is the man who plays in the film. For his sweep along the keys the studio gave video-gen one start frame and one sentence and ran it on ten models, then kept Seedance 2.5 and tightened the sentence over twenty-four takes. Takes like these made the offline cut the animators worked from; the film’s close-up of the hand is a later shot.

The maker’s scene starts on a drawing of his arm and ends with the arm moving on his desk. edit-images drew the sketch in several hands, from a technical drawing and a blueprint to charcoal and marker, until the line matched the film’s pencil pages. The studio posed the arm once, in the maker’s 3D view, and redrew each drawing to that pose, starting with “Redraw the robotic arm sketch in Image 1 to match the exact pose and proportions of the robotic arm in Image 2…”. The sketch in the film is that redraw.

The moving shot is where scene-builder comes in. It holds the desk as a 3D set, with the arm posed in it and a camera move on its timeline, and To the canvas puts that move on the board as a clay clip. video-restyler then paints the clip in the film’s look, with one of the studio’s own stills as its style picture. We rebuilt the shot this way for this post; the studio’s desk shot was made outside the boards.

Every character got a room: a cafe by a tram stop, a studio with a keyboard under the window, a workshop with the arm on the desk. Once a room worked, the studio moved the camera instead of making the picture again. change-angle builds a 3D gaussian from one picture, lets you orbit to the angle you want and repaints that view, so the room, the light and the person stay while the camera moves.

The cafe was shot this way from every side of the table, and the frame the film uses comes straight out of that search.