Chills - What's your story?

Chills is an interactive mobile experience inspired by 1980s horror comics: users submit creepy stories, hear them performed with synthetic voices and sound design, then vote the best tales up for monthly “episode” treatment blending illustration, motion, and narration.

The creative goal — capture the camp and dread of vintage anthology shows while using modern tooling to scale production. Early generative tooling made it possible to iterate voices quickly, layer atmospheric beds, and experiment with art pipelines that mixed AI-assisted frames with hand-drawn panels when that looked better on screen.

The stack — Vue-powered client UX, Firebase cloud functions for orchestration, ElevenLabs for voice, and Node utilities for media processing. The architecture prioritised fast feedback loops during recording and mixdown so a single story could move from submission to published episode without a big manual studio pass — critical when community volume spiked.

Operating reality — server costs outpaced early revenue, pausing the live product, but the archive and community proved the format. A relaunch path focuses on leaner rendering, selective use of cloud jobs, and tighter editorial guardrails around content safety and rights.

Lessons for client work — the project is a sandbox for responsible AI product patterns: transparently synthetic voices, human review for sensitive submissions, and pragmatic cost caps. Those patterns map directly to branded assistants, narrative marketing, and internal creative tools we build for organisations.