Frequently Asked Questions

What's involved in making an AI video?

You can break most jobs up into three stages: the initial idea, world-building, and content creation.

The Idea.
- Establishing the purpose and goal of the video and the basic technical specifications, such as video size.
- Generating creative ideas. The story or narrative that will dramatize your basic idea and make it more engaging and shareable.
- Scriptwriting. Planning what will happen and what will be said.
- Storyboarding. Creating a basic plan of what will be shown and the narrative structure.

World-building.
- Character design. Developing the appearance of the main characters.
- LORA model training for consistent main characters, if necessary.
- Character voice design. Selecting, cloning, and adjusting voices.
- World design, including sets and locations. Determining where the video is set and the genre.
- Rough dialogue draft. Initial creation of the vocal script.
- Character, dialogue, and world approval. Sign-off on all the main elements before detailed creation begins.

Content creation.
- Character image creation. Creating, selecting, and upscaling the main character images. (In general, this often requires producing 10 times the number of images needed to achieve the desired result.)
- Character image animation. Animating the selected images to show movement and emotion.
- B-roll image creation. Producing cutaway shots and all non-character shots.
- B-roll image animation.
- Dialogue creation. Fine-tuning the dialogue and adding emotion and tone.
- Lip sync animation. Combining animated character video and dialogue to create lip-syncing.
- Sound effect selection. Generating background sound effects.
- Soundtrack selection. Choosing music, generally from licensed professional musicians, or creating unique tracks using advanced AI tools.
- Editing. Bringing all the elements together, pacing, and polishing.
- Adding text, watermarks, subtitles, and logos.
- Delivery.

How long does it take to make an AI video?

That depends on a few factors. The type of video. How creative the video needs to be. The length of the video. How much creative direction you want to have. How much internal approval is usually required from within your organization. Actual production time is from as little as one week to about 6 weeks.

How much does it cost to make an AI video?

That depends entirely on the factors above.

Expect to pay anywhere from $2500 up. (About 10x less expensive than traditional methods.)

Deciding on the right type of video for your brand and audience and how you intend to use it is always going to be key. The goal is always going to be to make affordable creative, in a reasonable time, that multiplies your spending.

What’s the situation with copyright and licensing for AI videos?

Some of the videos on this page are experimental reproductions or re-imaginations of previously successful advertisements by world-class experts in their field (Levi’s, Guinness, Diet Coke, etc.).

They were created to test the limits of the current technology for the sake of comparison, as well as for learning and practice purposes.

Any commissioned video will contain unique creativity, imagery, and writing.

I won’t use the imagery, audio, or direct creative ideas of anyone who hasn’t made those things available for use by license.

Audio soundtracks are generally licensed from professional musicians. Don’t expect to be able to feature major artists in your video (e.g., Phil Collins in the Guinness ad), but high-quality professional backing music is available. Unique AI-generated music is also an option. A small licensing fee is generally recommended to protect the rights of the audio tracks on your end, typically around $15 a month.