Reproducing a Viral Video

I recently came across a pretty cool and catchy viral video and noticed that others quickly started reproducing it, with their pets, using AI and the outcomes were surprisingly consistent across the board. I’m sure you’ve all seen it, the cat dancing to the Bad Times audio.

One of the many variations of the viral trend.

There are a million different variations out there and if you’ve ever liked one, you likely messed up your algorithm for the foreseeable future. I was curious how the users were so quickly recreating the video and what tools they were using so I set out on a quest of my own… to recreate and then make it with my own character branding.

The origin video was created by content creator bouuhyachaka with a catchy tune and enticingly emotional choreography, it quickly became a popular AI template. Most users use the app CapCut to create their own version with their beloved pet. They offer hundreds of trendy templates, including this one. All you need is a picture of your pet and boom… in 2hrs you get this…

Watch the first generated pet video in the original Substack article.

Not the best, not the worst but fun to see your furry friend come to life. But, was it worth the 2hr process time? They advertise that they use Seedance (default 2.0 but 2.5 is also available), with loose copyright boundaries it makes it a perfect model for viral video generations.

The app seems rather low budget and is a bit hard at first to navigate. I initially found the template I used by searching “bad times cat dancing” scrolled a bit and that was the only one that immediately came up but when I went back to find it again – not such luck – lost to the sea of social slop. I searched by hashtags, the username and template name, even in the creator’s profile and nothing showed. I eventually gave up. I later found out from reading their FAQs that templates are disabled in some regions and can only be accessed through TikTok. There is a use template button on all their templates, but it either directs me to a screen to activate my free 7day trial, upgrade or doesn’t seem to work without much explanation.

Below are 2 videos, 1st is a quick screen capture tour of their UI and the 2nd is the output of the dancing man template video using a picture of my cat.

• Watch the CapCut UI tour in the original Substack article.
• Watch the dancing-cat template output in the original Substack article.

Although my beginner experience was not smooth, I can understand the appeal. If viral slop is your goal, you can pretty easily join the current trends. It has an agent that is pretty useful and with just a short prompt and a reference image can quickly create decent quality content. It has a few tutorials available and for 23,99€ you can become an influencer and produce a much better video than myself.

CapCut chadling convo.

Final CapCut video clip:

Watch the final CapCut clip in the original Substack article.

In the end, I opted for a different path and ended up creating my own version with a few of my established characters I’ve been working on for a while. Much more my style.

Watch the final branded version in the original Substack article.