Media Models and Your Own Domain
Your agent gets a camera. Two skills that read the media model catalogue and price a job before running it, one photograph turned into a moving hero, a design direction taken from work you admire, and the whole site on a domain you own.
You need the site from Module 2, built, committed and deployed. If you missed it, the Module 2 page has the guide. Bring two or three high resolution photographs and three to five sites you admire, tabs already open.
The two skills your agent writes
Neither one hardcodes a model name. Media models change monthly, so a skill with a model written into it is wrong by the time you finish writing it. The skill is told where to look, not what to use.
Reads the fal catalogue and writes a dated briefing: endpoint ids, exact prices with their units, input fields, resolution and duration caps, and what one five second 1080p clip costs from each pick.
Why it matters: Module 2 taught your agent what is good. This one tells it what it can actually call. A leaderboard cannot be pasted into code.
Picks the family, picks the endpoint from the latest briefing, estimates the cost and shows you the number before spending it, generates two variants, converts video for the web, and logs what it actually cost.
Why it matters: The cost gate is four lines of the brief and it is the whole difference between a tool and a liability.
The ideas that carry the session
Know the price before you spend it
Text models are cheap enough to be careless with. Media models are not. The habit that matters is not picking the best model, it is being able to work out what a job costs before you run it.
The family decides the result
If you already have the photograph, you want image to video. Hand the same job to a text to video model and it will invent a different fence. Most bad media output is the right prompt sent to the wrong family.
The depth is a guess
Image to video infers depth from one photograph and re-renders the frames. Ask for a slow camera move and the model has less to invent, which is why slow moves look expensive and fast ones look cheap.
Rules, not adjectives
"Modern and clean" gets you the average of everything the model has ever seen. A type scale, a spacing value and one accent colour get you a decision you can check against the built page.
Steal the mechanism, not the layout
Extracting principles from work you admire is what designers have always done. Reproducing someone else’s site is not. The test is whether a visitor could tell where you got it.
A domain is rented, not bought
It expires, and then it returns to the market for anyone to register. Turn on auto renew the day you buy it, not the day you remember.
The 60-minute session
Part one gives the agent a camera. Part two uses it. The domain and the deploy are protected: a live HTTPS URL is the deliverable.
Open with the payoff
The Module 2 site and the finished site side by side. Static hero against moving hero, preview URL against a real domain. The cost of the session, said out loud.
macOS ground rules, reopen the project
The Mac equivalents table, ffmpeg installed, then the agent caught up on the job from HERMES.md rather than from you retyping it.
The key and where it lives
A fal account with a spend limit. The key into .env, and .env into .gitignore first, in that order. Then git status proves it, and the agent scans the repo for credentials.
Two skills from one brief
You describe what you want once; the agent writes both skills and runs each of them. The cost gate gets pointed at on camera.
Read a catalogue properly
Mixed units, the wrong family, resolution and duration caps. Work out what one five second 1080p clip costs before generating it.
The hero video
One photograph, a slow push in with a lateral drift, two variants. Then ffmpeg to a web ready mp4 and a poster frame, under 2 MB.
Design by example
Screenshot three to five sites you admire. The agent extracts type, space, colour, hierarchy and motion into design-brief.md. Rules, not adjectives, and where the copying line sits.
Rebuild
Apply the design brief and the hero video. Muted, playsinline, a poster frame, and reduced motion respected. Checked at 375px live.
Domain and deploy
Buy it live, attach it, pick apex or www, check the certificate, and turn on auto renew where the class can see it.
The build, step by step
Every command and every copy-pasteable brief is in the student guide.
What it costs
- Media generation on fal.ai
- About 2 USD
- A domain, per year
- 10 to 20 USD
- ffmpeg, and the hosting
- Free
Add the credit and set a spend limit before you arrive. This is the first module in the course that spends real money.
The honest part
A video hero is not automatically better than a photograph. It is better when the motion shows something a still cannot, which for a fence is depth, length, and how light sits on the boards. If the clip does not do that, a sharp photograph beats it, loads faster, and never warps a post. The same goes for the domain: it makes the site look like a business, and it changes nothing about whether the site gets quote requests.
Knowledge check
Five quick questions to check your understanding, then four to answer in your own words for peer review.
1.You have a photograph of a finished fence and you want a five second clip of it with a slow camera move. Which model family is that?
2.Video models are normally priced by:
3.Why does .env go into .gitignore before the key goes into .env?
4.A hero video needs muted and playsinline because:
5.What happens to a domain you do not renew?
Explain in your own words
Answer these in your own words. Explaining a concept is the best test that you understand it. You can check your results now; sign in when you save to keep them in your account.
Where this sits in the course
Each module is a standalone hands-on session, though the later ones build on what the earlier ones left running.
Join us live
Register on Luma to get the student guide and the livestream link. Read the guide before you arrive; the session moves at the speed of someone who already has the accounts open.