Hack #5: Kiro · AWS Kiro
23 Apr, 14:29
Reel&Ink is an AI-powered animated story studio that turns a single text prompt into a fully produced animated video. You describe a story idea, and the app generates everything: visual style, characters with unique AI-designed voices, locations with background art, a structured screenplay, full audio production (narration, dialogue, music, sound effects), and a final animated video, all playable in the browser. The entire project was built using Kiro's spec-driven development. Requirements, technical design, and implementation tasks were defined as specs upfront, and Kiro's AI agent implemented them systematically. Steering files kept every generated file consistent, hooks automated type syncing and linting, and MCP servers (including Firecrawl for web access) extended the agent's capabilities during development. A custom HyperFrames Power was built using Kiro's Power Builder to give the agent deep knowledge of the video composition framework. ElevenLabs powers every sound in the app: the Voice Design API creates unique character voices from text descriptions, the TTS API generates expressive narration and dialogue with word-level timestamps, and the Music and Sound Effects APIs compose original scores and ambient audio per scene. Those word-level timestamps are what drive the final video, syncing subtitles, character animations, and scene transitions to the spoken audio through HyperFrames HTML compositions with GSAP timelines.
