We Make Our Own Music Now. And We Animate.

Vasrue Digital Media’s first cartoon: Buena Vista, Georgia, Here We Come! A 3:56 animated sing-along for kids, with its own original song, its own cast, and every word lighting up on screen as it is sung. Song, characters, animation and edit were all made in-house.

Series: Nature Adventure Friends, Thanksgiving special  ·  Created and directed by: Clinton Douglas IV  ·  Company: KSD GovCon LLC DBA Vasrue Digital Media  ·  An original Vasrue production, AI-assisted, not client work

Two things that are new here

Where it came from

The story is Clinton Douglas IV’s own. As a child he rode down to Georgia to visit family in the countryside around Buena Vista: cotton in the fields, deer at the edge of the woods, cousins he only saw on those trips. The cartoon turns those memories into an adventure for two new characters, a brother and sister named CJ and Kiani, and their dogs.

It is family-inspired fiction, not a record of events. The place is real, and the production treats it that way: pines, farmland, cotton and pecan trees, with no invented mountains. Locals say BYOO-nuh VISS-tuh, and the video teaches that on screen.

I wanted kids today to feel what I felt in the back seat of that car.

The music

The song came first. A sing-along only works if the tune is easy to catch and the words are easy to say, so the music was finished before a single frame was animated.

1. Lyrics from the storyEach verse is one part of the trip: the road, the cotton field and the deer, the cousins and the pies. Every line had to be short enough for a young child to sing and true to the place.
2. A written music briefTempo, key, instruments, the feel of the vocal and how to pronounce the town’s name. One rule sat above the rest: a fresh melody that imitates no existing song.
3. Produced with AI music toolsThe brief and the lyrics were turned into a full recording: a warm lead vocal, a group chorus, acoustic guitar, banjo, fiddle and handclaps. It runs about 117 beats a minute in G major.
4. Measured, then masteredThe finished track was measured beat by beat so the picture could be cut to it, and the film was mastered to −14 LUFS, the level YouTube plays music at.
5. RegisteredThe track is logged in Vasrue’s own rights registry, with its ownership notice written into the audio file itself.

Original songwriting, lyric writing for children, music direction, AI music production, beat mapping, loudness mastering.

The animation

The hard part of animating with AI is not making one good picture. It is making the same boy, the same girl and the same two dogs show up in every shot. That was solved on paper before anything moved.

1. Lock the castFour leads, each with a fixed outfit, colours and personality. Minnie is black and white with a pink bow. Mack is white with a blue collar. They are never merged into one dog.
2. Plan the scenesEight scenes on one sheet, from the road trip to the sunset, each tied to a line of the song.
3. Make the keyframes57 concept and keyframe stills were made on the way to an approved start frame for each scene.
4. AnimateNine clips, four to twenty seconds each, generated with an AI video model. Every clip starts from an approved keyframe, so the animation begins from a picture the director already signed off on.
5. Cut it to the songThe clips were numbered in scene order, described second by second, and cut into 54 shots that land on the beat.

Character design, character consistency, storyboarding, keyframe art direction, AI animation, shot selection.

The sing-along edit

The brief was one sentence long: put the words at the bottom so kids can follow along and sing. Doing that well meant knowing when every single word is sung.

1. Find every wordSpeech recognition listened to the sung track and timed 202 words. Those timings were matched back to the official lyric sheet, so the screen always shows the correct spelling, even where the software misheard a name.
2. Light them up29 lyric lines sit in a rounded plate at the bottom of the frame, in a round, friendly typeface. The word being sung fills with yellow.
3. Teach along the wayTen short facts pop up as the song goes: cotton grows on plants, deer turn their ears to listen, pine trees stay green all year.
4. Render and checkThe final 7,087 frames rendered in 36 seconds across 198 cloud workers. Then every on-screen moment was laid out on one sheet and read through, line by line.

Three versions

Music video editing, lyric and caption timing, kinetic captions, cutting to the beat, on-screen learning graphics, quality control.

The rules the director set

Tools will make almost anything you ask for. The work is in deciding what they are not allowed to make. These rules were written down before production and held to the end.

• Footage only. The final cut is 100% animated clips.
• One locked look. Everything matches the approved character sheet. No redesigns.
• The real Georgia. Pines, farmland, cotton and pecan trees. No invented mountains.
• An original melody. The song imitates no existing tune.
• Kid-safe. No scary moments, and no animals chased or held.
• “Pies piled high” means plenty. Many pies across the table, never a tower.
• Say it right. “Buena Vista” is spelled correctly on screen and pronounced the way locals say it.

AI-assisted, human-directed

This cartoon was made with AI. The music and vocals, the character art, the animation and the assembly of the edit were all produced with AI tools.

The concept, the story, the characters and the creative calls were Clinton’s. He wrote the rules above, chose the keyframes, threw out what did not match, and sent the edit back until it was right. From the first concept image to the finished cut took about 23 hours.

What comes next

This is the first one. Nature Adventure Friends is going into full production as a series built on the same cast and the same method: lock the song, then animate to it. A woodland episode with eight new animal friends is planned and scripted, and a five-chapter Thanksgiving story set in the same world is drafted.

The same pipeline is available to clients: an original song or jingle, a consistent cast of characters, and a finished animated video with the words on screen.

What this project is

An original production by Vasrue Digital Media, not client work. The music, vocals, artwork and animation are AI-generated under the direction of Clinton Douglas IV; the story is inspired by his childhood and is fiction. Every figure on this page comes from the project’s own build log and file records. © 2026 Vasrue Digital Media. Rights registry ID VDM-MUS-2026-0001. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the City of Buena Vista, Georgia.

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