The Process

This was a really challenging and interesting project! The story centers around 3 main characters: Jessie the Golden Retriever, Eilidh a 6 year old Scottish girl and James, her 2 year old brother. Set in the town of Longniddry, it features lots of water and mud, a beautiful park and much fun had by all!

The challenge was to create 3 consistent characters that would be recognizable to the family the video is created for and to train a custom GPT to generate coherent scenes featuring these characters.  I also created a consistent character for Mum, who appears in 3 scenes. I was really happy with my characters and Chat GPT did a beautiful job with the image generation when the prompt asked for two of the characters. However, as soon as I asked for 3 it totally fell apart, either catastrophically losing the consistency of one of the characters or merging their attributes in weird and sometimes nightmarish ways!

I got around this by changing the story to reduce the number of scenes requiring the James character making Eilidh and Jessie the central characters. When all else failed I added James' character in post-generation using Canva.

A key element of all these projects is selecting the right voice, music and sound effects. I was particularly delighted with my Scottish narrator from ElevenLabs and my Celtic folk music from Pixabay, which created the exact atmosphere I was looking for!

The Story

Jessie is the beloved Golden Retriever of an active young family. By all accounts Jessie leads a charmed life.  She loves going on play dates at doggy day care. Like a typical Golden Retriever she is stick and water obsessed. She loves nothing better than swimming in streams and splashing in muddy puddles and is afforded plenty of opportunities to indulge her doggy passions!

Eilidh (pronounced "Aylee") is an avid reader. One of her favorite books is "The Gruffalo"  by Julia Donaldson. With this in mind I used rhyming story telling for this project. I love the Gruffalo and rhyming stories were my absolute favorite as a child so this was very nostalgic to me and I had so much fun with it!

James apparently has great ball skills and is showing early promise as a footballer so we had to sneak in a football in one of the scenes!

It was extremely helpful to collaborate with Eilidh, James and Jessie's Gran to gather all these little details that are so important in creating personalization, meaning and a story that will charm and delight the intended audience!

More related to this story

As with all my projects I am proud to offer Eilidh, Jessie and James themed merchandise on my RedBubble Store.  I am also building a beautiful collection that with highly detailed and realistic Golden Retriever art prints. My hope is that many will be able to relate to the very popular Golden Retriever breed. These dogs are amazing with children and this collection celebrates the relationship between dogs and their kids. Childhood is so much better with dogs, in my unbiased opinion!  It was a joy to create these designs to celebrate this!

If you have any requests for additional images or products related to Eilidh, Jessie and James or a pet of your own, feel free to contact me.

Books:  I am excited to introduce the Eilidh and Jessie coloring book and illustrated story book, now available for purchase on Amazon!

The Coloring book features 40 Golden Retriever coloring pages along with educational information on Golden Retriever character traits and how to train and care for them.

The illustrated story book features images from the video and text appropriate for a 6 year old reading level.

Buy these books on Amazon:

Golden Retriever Adventures

Eilidh and Jessie's Muddy Adventure