How to make an AI video

An end-to-end walkthrough: deciding the shot, fixing the frame, generating motion, and assembling clips into something finished.

Last verified 2026-08-26

A practical sequence for producing a finished AI video, rather than a pile of interesting clips. The order matters more than any individual tool.

1. Decide the shot before you open anything

Write, in one sentence, what happens on screen. If you cannot, no model will resolve the ambiguity for you — it will pick something. A few seconds holds one action, so a sentence needing "and then" is at least two clips.

2. Fix the frame first

This is the step that separates people who get results from people who burn credits. Generate the opening frame as a still — image generations cost a fraction of video ones and iterate in seconds. Only when the frame is right does it become the input for animation. See image to video.

Skip this only when the shot is genuinely generic and nothing specific must appear.

3. Write motion, not description

With the frame settled, the prompt describes change: one subject action, one camera move, and the secondary motion that sells realism — hair, fabric, steam, foliage. Do not re-describe what is in the frame.

4. Generate short and judge in order

Judge each result on these, in this sequence, because each has a different fix:

1. Stability — does the subject stay itself? If not, the shot is too demanding; simplify.
2. Motion quality — does it move with weight? If not, try another model.
3. Framing through the move — does the composition survive the camera move?
4. Detail at full screen — always check here, never on a preview.

5. Assemble rather than extend

Longer pieces are built by cutting several short clips together, not by generating one long take. Quality degrades with duration in every current model, so a 30-second piece is six good five-second clips with an edit, not one 30-second generation.

6. Finish outside the generator

Add text, colour grade, and mix sound in an editor. Models garble on-screen text and most output silence, so both belong in post. Where the model generates audio natively — see Veo 3 — you skip the voice step but usually still want a mix pass.

The most common mistakes

• Starting with text-to-video when something specific had to appear.
• Prompting a sequence into a clip that holds one action.
• Generating long instead of cutting short clips together.
• Judging on a phone, where flicker and drift are invisible.
• Re-rolling the frame when only the motion was wrong.