Festivus Dec 23: a brewery 'airing of grievances' promo clip with cues

To promote a Festivus night, shoot one photo of a plain pole (or a taproom with a bare, undecorated tree stand), animate it into a short deadpan clip, and burn the event details on as caption cues. Festivus is December 23, which in 2026 is a Wednesday, so a bar can run a midweek event with a clear start time and a grievance sign-up.

What is Festivus, in terms a promo can use?

According to Wikipedia, Festivus takes place on December 23, was created by Daniel O'Keefe in 1966 as a family tradition, and reached mainstream culture through the 1997 Seinfeld episode "The Strike". Its customs are an unadorned aluminum pole instead of a tree, the airing of grievances at dinner, and feats of strength at the end.

Those three customs are your three beats. The pole is the hero shot, the grievances are the event hook, and the feats of strength can be an arm-wrestling bracket. Avoid quoting the show's lines or using its characters; describe the customs in your own words.

How do you make the clip?

Start from your photo as first_frame and prompt for a slow push-in on the pole with nothing moving but a little dust in the light. Deadpan reads better than motion. Check GET /v1/videos/models for the duration and resolution each model accepts, then submit to POST /v1/videos and poll the job as described in the jobs guide.

Where do the event details go?

Use video captions cues for the text: "Festivus at the taproom", "Wed Dec 23, 7 pm", "Sign up to air one grievance". Each cue has text, start and end, and cues need no speech-to-text, so the silent clip will not fail with caption_no_speech.

If you want your event poster in the corner, timeline compose stacks or overlays one hosted still on one hosted video and returns one MP4. The docs give a flat $0.02 per job and require an Idempotency-Key.

What should you check before posting?

• The start time and the date, read from the finished file, not the script.
• That the clip does not use show footage, music or character likenesses.
• Your venue's rules on alcohol advertising for the platform you post on.

Which model should you pick, and how do you keep spend bounded?

Do not guess at model limits. The Sume video guide says to read GET /v1/videos/models before submitting, because limits differ per model: for example wan-3.0 accepts 2 to 30 seconds, seedance-2.5 accepts 4 to 30 seconds at 480p, 720p and 1080p, and gemini-omni-flash-1.1 accepts 3 to 10 seconds. The same catalog carries pricing_skus, so you can read the price of the length and resolution you want before you spend anything.

For a social story, a short clip at a modest resolution is enough; a higher tier costs more and a phone screen rarely shows the difference. Draft once at the lowest tier that looks right, check the cues and the dates, and only then decide whether a second render is worth it.

Keep the idempotency habit too. Where an endpoint requires an Idempotency-Key, reuse the same key when you retry the same request so a network error does not create a duplicate job.