Clinic flu-shot reminder video: four 20-second avatar clips

A clinic or pharmacy can make a flu-shot reminder video by sending a short script to Sume's avatar route and burning captions onto the result. Four 20-second clips cost $14.72 at the standard tier, $19.60 at plus and $44.00 at max, before captions, using the per-second rates in Sume's pricing code.

The CDC's Seasonal Flu Vaccine Basics page says "Everyone 6 months and older should get a flu vaccine every season with rare exceptions." That is a message a front desk can repeat in a 20-second clip, and it is the only health claim this post leans on (read 2026-10-10). Anything clinical beyond that, such as timing or eligibility for a specific patient, belongs to your clinicians, not to a script generator.

This post covers the production side only: what to send, what it costs and where the limits are.

What the clips are for

A reminder works best as a set of short, single-purpose clips rather than one long video. A typical front-desk set looks like this:

• A general reminder that flu vaccination is recommended every season, quoting the CDC line above.
• A walk-in hours clip for the waiting-room screen.
• A text-message or social clip with the booking link in the caption of the post, not in the video.
• A clip for patients at higher risk, which the CDC page describes as people "at higher risk of serious complications from influenza" (read 2026-10-10). Keep the wording general and let staff handle individual questions.

How to request the avatar video

The avatar route is a POST to /v1/avatar-1.0/talking-video with a ready avatar handle and a script. Sume estimates the duration from the script and accepts 4 to 60 seconds inclusive. Quality is one of standard, plus or max, with plus as the default when you omit it, and resolution is 720p at this time. The aspect ratio defaults to 9:16 and can be 1:1, 3:4, 9:16, 4:3 or 16:9, so a waiting-room TV can take 16:9 while social takes 9:16. Details are on Generate avatar video.

Avatar 1.0 is English-only. If your patients need Spanish or another language, this route is not the one to use for that version. Voice cloning is also app-only and is not available through the API.

Writes need an Idempotency-Key header so a retry does not create a second paid job. The default mode is asynchronous: you get status and result URLs and poll the job envelope.

Cost by quality tier

Avatar video is billed per second with no product image attached. A 20-second script is 20 seconds of billed video; four of them is 80 seconds. Rates come from the fixed price table in Sume's provider-pricing package, read 2026-10-10.

Add captions for a muted waiting room

Waiting-room screens and social feeds are often muted, so burned-in captions matter. The standalone caption route takes a public video URL, and each accepted job costs $0.20 for videos of up to 60 seconds, per Video captions. Four clips add $0.80, which brings the standard-tier set to $15.52 and the plus-tier set to $20.40.

The caption route needs a public HTTPS video URL, so once an avatar job finishes, pass its result URL to the caption job as a second request. Check the first job's status before you submit the second.

Review before it goes on a screen

Have a clinician read each script before you generate, since changing wording after the fact means paying for the clip again. Keep scripts to what the CDC page supports, avoid dates you have not confirmed with your supplier, and put the booking link and opening hours in the post text where they can be updated without a new render.

If you also make school-facing reminders, see the conference reminder clips for the same pattern with a different audience.