Inspiration: I was inspired to make my spidercat video because I adore cats but have intense arachnophobia. I wondered what would happen psychologically if I combined my favorite animal with my most feared one. After creating several spidercat pieces, my fear has noticeably decreased; I even let a spider in my home stay for the first time. This video garnered a lot of attention on Instagram, and viewers’ conflicted reactions have been fascinating. Many say the video has made them question their own fear and disgust. From a psychological lens, it has felt like exposure therapy and a reminder that many “scary” things are terrifying mainly because they’re unfamiliar or learned fears.
How I Did It: To build the project, I first designed the spidercat in Midjourney, then refined the number and placement of legs in Google’s Gemini NanoBanana. With that clean hybrid, I used Midjourney’s inpainting tool plus a reference photo of a real living room to infill the man, couch, and room, so the scene looks like a casual snapshot. I then upscaled the image with Topaz Gigapixel then animated it in Veo 3.1 Fast. I generated additional purring in ElevenLabs and suspenseful music in Suno, did the editing in Adobe Premiere Pro, and finished with an upscale in Topaz Video AI.
What I Learned: Through this process, I learned how resistant both image and video models are to (photorealistic) hybrid creatures; they tend to default back to either a cat or a spider. For example, the video-generated spidercat kept losing legs (turning into a regular cat) as it crawled. It took a lot of persistence, prompt tweaking, and reference-photo iteration to get a believable spidercat image and to keep its anatomy consistent in the video.
Built With
- adobe-premiere-pro
- elevenlabs
- google-gemini-nanobanana
- midjourney
- suno
- topaz
- veo-3.1-fast
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