Trick-or-treat hours video for your street, Saturday Oct 31

To announce trick-or-treat hours for your street, make one 9:16 poster that carries the exact times, generate a 6-second atmospheric backdrop with no text in it, and join them in one Timeline 1.0 render: 6 seconds of motion, then 4 seconds holding the poster. On Sume that is roughly $0.91 end to end, and the times stay legible because they live in a still, not in a video model's output.

Halloween 2026 lands on a Saturday, October 31. The NRF's 2026 survey (read 2026-10-04) says 61% of consumers plan to hand out candy, 42% will decorate their home or yard, and 74% celebrate. Neighbours who hand out candy want to know when to turn the porch light on.

Why keep the times in a still image?

Video models animate pixels; they do not proofread. Digits and colons in generated footage drift from frame to frame. A still image generated once and checked by you is stable, and Timeline holds a still as a static frame for as long as you ask. So the split is: the video model makes mood (porch lights, fog, leaves), the poster makes the information.

What does the pipeline cost?

Wan 3.0 on the Video Router lists $0.05, $0.10 and $0.20 per second by resolution, and Sume bills list x 1.25, so 720p is $0.125 a second (Video Router docs, read 2026-10-04). Timeline renders at $0.10 per output minute, rounded up (Timeline docs). The poster uses Ideogram 4.5, which lists $0.03, $0.06 or $0.22 per image by quality before Sume's margin (Image API docs).

How do I write the poster prompt?

Quote every line you want on the poster and keep it short: the street name, the date, the hours, one line about porch lights. Check the generated times against your own before you render anything else. If a digit is wrong, regenerate the still; it costs cents.

Request it at aspect_ratio: "9:16" so it fills the frame without cropping. The same call shape works for the backdrop, with image_url pointing at a porch photo if you want your own street, or no image for pure text-to-video.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-router/generate \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: street-backdrop-001" \
  -d '{
    "model": "wan-3.0",
    "prompt": "Quiet suburban street at dusk, glowing jack-o-lanterns on porches, low fog, drifting leaves. No people, no text.",
    "resolution": "720p",
    "duration": 6,
    "aspect_ratio": "9:16",
    "mode": "async"
  }'

How do I join the backdrop and the poster?

When both jobs complete, read each Sume-hosted URL from the job result and send them to Timeline with a silent spine. audio.mode: "silence" declares the length without a sound file, and the poster slot is just a still with a duration. Timeline requires media.sume.com URLs, which generated artifacts already are.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/timeline-1.0/render \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: street-timeline-001" \
  -d '{
    "audio": { "mode": "silence", "duration_seconds": 10 },
    "video": [
      { "source_url": "BACKDROP_MEDIA_URL", "start": 0, "duration": 6 },
      { "source_url": "POSTER_MEDIA_URL", "start": 6, "duration": 4,
        "transition": { "type": "fade", "duration": 0.5 } }
    ]
  }'

What should I check before posting?

Read the poster's hours and street name against your notes, play the render once muted, and confirm the backdrop has no stray lettering. Poll with GET /v1/jobs/{id}/status and stop on completed, failed or canceled; never resubmit a paid request because a local timer ran out (Jobs and results). Post it to the neighbourhood group the morning of October 31 and pin it.