The Event
The Jazz Age Jubilee was a sold-out fundraiser for Mount Evans Home Health and Hospice, supporting Camp Comfort -- a grief support program for children and teens. The event needed themed visual materials on a nonprofit budget. What was delivered: a 3-minute documentary, 16 physical art prints, and a 6x4 foot hand-painted marquee, all built using AI image generation for a total materials cost under five hundred dollars.
The LoRA Training
The centerpiece of the technical work was training a custom LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) model on 13 reference images of the Savoy Ballroom sign. Three training runs refined the model, with each iteration improving on the last through dataset quality control -- removing watermarks, ensuring caption consistency, and adjusting training parameters (epochs, steps, learning rate). Training ran on fal.ai cloud GPUs at approximately two dollars per run, making the entire model development cost around six dollars.
LoRA training is a fine-tuning technique that adds small trainable matrices to a frozen base model, allowing it to learn new visual concepts (in this case, the specific typography and neon sign aesthetic of the Savoy Ballroom) without the compute cost of full model training. The trained LoRA was then used within ComfyUI workflows to generate consistent imagery in the Savoy aesthetic.
The Documentary
A 3-minute mini documentary about the history of the Savoy Ballroom combined several AI-augmented production techniques: AI voiceover generated through ElevenLabs, AI-enhanced video walkthroughs created from historical photographs using ComfyUI (animating still images into subtle motion), traditional motion graphics composed in After Effects, and captioning in Premiere Pro. The CEO of the nonprofit personally complimented the documentary.
The Physical Prints
16 foam-core prints at three different sizes were produced using ComfyUI workflows. Historical photographs were upscaled using 4x-UltraSharp models, enhanced with the custom Savoy LoRA for stylistic consistency, and processed through img2img workflows to create period-appropriate compositions. Manus (an AI research agent) was used to source the original historical photographs. The prints were mounted on foam-core and displayed throughout the event venue.
The Marquee
A 6x4 foot hand-painted reproduction of the Savoy Ballroom marquee sign, designed using AI-generated reference imagery and executed as a physical art piece. This combined traditional craft (hand-painting) with AI-assisted design (the reference layouts were generated and refined in ComfyUI before being transferred to the physical medium).
The Numbers
Total materials cost: approximately five hundred dollars. A comparable studio production would run three to five thousand dollars. A photo booth vendor alone (which was originally planned but replaced with an iPad-based solution due to time constraints) would have been five hundred to fifteen hundred dollars. The event sold out and raised over two hundred thousand dollars for hospice care. All creative work was done on personal time, unpaid.
Tech Stack
ComfyUI (image generation and upscaling), fal.ai (cloud GPU for LoRA training), ElevenLabs (AI voiceover), After Effects (motion graphics), Premiere Pro (editing and captioning), Manus (historical photo research), foam-core mounting and hand-painting (physical production).