The format
There is an obvious way to make these videos and it is the wrong one. The obvious way is to take the footage you have — the dog at the shelter, the dog in the new house — run it through a filter that makes it look like a cartoon, and post it. Don't do that.
Stylising footage you already have is decoration applied to a problem you have already solved. You have a real animal, real video, and real feeling. Making it look drawn subtracts credibility and adds nothing, and it makes a Pulitzer-bylined story look like content-farm output.
The place animation genuinely earns its keep is the part you cannot film — rendered in anime style, whose whole visual tradition is emotional warmth around animals and small moments. Nobody has footage of Tanner as a stray. Nobody filmed the eleven weeks of waiting. That absence is the emotional centre of every rescue story ever told, and right now it gets filled with a still photograph and a line of narration.
The rule
Drawn past, real present. Everything before the rescue is animated. Everything from the rescue forward is real footage. The cut between them is the story — and because the two registers are visibly different, nobody can mistake the animated section for documentary. The format solves the authenticity problem instead of creating one.
The six-beat structure — 35 to 45 seconds
0–3s
The hook Text on black
One arresting sentence, burned in, readable in a thumb-scroll. "This husky is blind. He didn't know that was unusual." No logo, no masthead, no throat-clearing — you have three seconds.
3–13s
The past Animated
The months before rescue. Stray on a roadside, a storm, a shape in a doorway. Nobody filmed this, which is exactly why it's drawn. Anime style: hand-painted backgrounds, soft light, expressive eyes. Establish one character reference image first and reuse it for every shot, or the dog changes breed between cuts.
13–18s
The turn Animated → Real
The hard cut. Animation resolves into the actual intake footage — hands, a leash, a kennel door. Hold the audio across the cut so the transition lands emotionally before it lands visually.
18–30s
The present Real footage
Phone video from the shelter and the adopter's house. Unpolished is fine — better than fine. This is the payoff and it has to be unmistakably true.
30–36s
The number Real + text
How many animals are still waiting at that shelter, today, as a figure on screen. This is what converts a nice story into an action.
36–42s
The ask Card
Shelter name, the adoption weekend, the URL. One card, one instruction. Masthead and Mars credit go here, at the end, where they don't cost you the first three seconds.
How you get your video
You do not need to produce this yourself. Send us the photograph and the story — the same two things the page is made from — and The Middleburg Page returns the finished vertical video: narrated, captioned, cut to platform, and ready to post from your own accounts.
You sendThe animal’s photograph — the best one you have — the story text with byline, your paper’s social handle, and the shelter’s name. Email them to us as they are — attachments are fine.
Better stillFour to six minutes of vertical phone footage from the shelter visit — the kennel, the animal, one slow push on its face. The second half of every video is real footage, and yours beats anything generated.
You get backA 1080 × 1920 MP4, 35–45 seconds, burned-in captions, one series voice, your masthead on the end card. Post it natively on Reels and Shorts rather than re-uploading a watermarked copy across platforms.
Prefer to produce it yourself? The stack
Everything below is the stack we use to make these, published so a partner paper that wants to bring production in-house can do exactly that. ElevenLabs carries the voice, the music and the assembly on one timeline, and its video models generate visuals from text and images. Turning your own shelter footage into animation is a different job — video-to-video restyling — and the dedicated tools are better at it.
| Tool | What it's for here | Price |
|---|
| ElevenLabs Core |
Narration, voice cloning, music bed, sound effects, and the single timeline where the whole thing gets assembled. Starter includes a commercial licence and instant voice cloning — enough to begin. Creator adds professional voice cloning. |
Starter $6/mo
Creator $22/mo |
| Magic Hour Core |
Video-to-video restyling — built specifically for consistent anime and comic looks with strong face and scene consistency. Best value for the drawn-past sequences. Creator tier gives 1.4 hours of generation a year, which is far more than twelve Reels need. |
Creator $10/mo
annual; $15 monthly |
| Runway |
The upgrade path. Better compositional control and cinematic quality, stronger at preserving structure through a restyle. Move here if Magic Hour's consistency isn't holding across a sequence. |
Standard $12/mo
annual; $15 monthly |
| CapCut |
Final assembly, captions, trimming to platform. Free tier is genuinely sufficient. Its own AI restyling is filter-grade — don't rely on it for the animated sections. |
Free |
| A phone |
The real footage. Every beat from 13 seconds onward. Shoot vertical, shoot more than you need, and do not stabilise the life out of it. |
$0 |
ElevenLabs Starter$6
Magic Hour Creator (annual billing)$10
CapCut$0
Monthly cost to produce the series$16
Specifications
Frame1080 × 1920, 9:16. Export at 30fps. Shoot vertical natively — cropping from horizontal loses the subject every time.
Safe zonesKeep everything that matters out of the top 250 px and the bottom 420 px. Platform UI — captions, handle, audio credit, buttons — sits there and will cover your best frame.
CaptionsBurned in, always. Most Reels play muted. If the story only works with sound, it doesn't work.
Length35–45 seconds. Long enough for the turn to land, short enough to hold completion rate — which is the metric the algorithm actually rewards.
Character consistencyGenerate one reference image of the animal first, then drive every animated shot from it. Skipping this is the single commonest failure: the dog changes breed mid-sequence.
AudioOne voice across the whole series. Clone it once and keep it — the series should sound like a series.
The monthly production run
If we are producing your video, steps 1, 2 and 6 are yours; the middle ones are ours.
- Shoot at the shelter while reporting. Same visit. Vertical, four to six minutes of raw footage, plus thirty seconds of the kennel and one slow push on the animal's face. Costs nothing extra if it happens during the interview.
- Pull the reference image. One clean still of the animal. Everything animated is generated from it.
- Write the six beats before generating anything. The beat sheet is the whole job. Generating first and structuring afterwards is how a $16 workflow turns into a weekend.
- Generate the drawn past. Three or four shots, ten seconds total. Regenerate freely — credits are the cheap part.
- Narrate and assemble. ElevenLabs for voice and bed, CapCut for the cut and captions.
- Post, then log the numbers. Views, completion rate, saves, shares, profile visits, link taps. Log them the same day into the same sheet every month.
The numbers that decide the renewal
Print circulation is an estimate you argue about. Web and social numbers are facts you present. When Mars decides whether to renew, and whether to fund the fifty-paper version, they will be looking at the things they can verify — so instrument this from the first issue rather than assembling a case in month eleven.
- Completion rate is the one that matters most and the one most people don't report. A 25,000-view Reel with 30% completion is worth less than an 8,000-view Reel with 70%, and a sponsor who understands social will know that.
- Saves and shares beat likes. A share is a reader doing your distribution for you, which is precisely the argument Leland is making to Mars about community networks.
- Link taps to the jump page connect social to the story and give you a number that is unarguably yours rather than the platform's.
- Adoptions attributed to the page. Ask the shelter to record how each adopter heard about the animal. This is the only metric that measures the thing the programme is actually for, and it is the one that will make Mars proud to be in it.
Guardrails
Get written permission from the shelter for every animal's likeness and from adopters before their homes appear. Label the animated sections as illustration in the caption — not because anyone would be fooled, but because saying so plainly is what lets you use the technique at all. And keep Mars' review confined to Mars' own content: the moment a sponsor gets notes on the rescue reporting, the whole model stops being defensible.