How to Make AI Videos: A Beginner's Guide That Saves Your Credits

The first AI video most people make looks impressive for three seconds and falls apart after five. The face changes. The product changes colour. The camera drifts somewhere nobody asked for.

That's not because the tools are bad. It's because most beginners do what one student of mine did in his first week: he generated seven clips for one 30-second video, spent a lot of credits, and told me they "were terrible but I learned a lot". He was right on both counts. The second video took two clips.

This guide is the shortcut between those two videos.

Step 1: Pick the right type of generation

There are three ways to make an AI clip. Choosing the right one saves more credits than any prompt trick.

Type	You start from	Use it when	Control
Text-to-video	A written prompt	You're exploring ideas and have no visuals yet	Lowest
Image-to-video	A photo or generated image	You need a specific product, person, place or brand look	High
Video-to-video	Existing footage	You want to restyle, extend or edit real footage	High

For professional work I almost always use image-to-video. Generate (or photograph) the exact frame you want first, then animate it. The model has far less to invent, so it has far less to get wrong.

Step 2: Write a one-page Story Bible before you generate anything

This is the rule I give every student: never generate anything without a Story Bible. It's half a page that fixes who, what, where and the tone of the video. Without it, every clip makes its own creative decisions and nothing matches.

• Subject: what the video is about, in one sentence.
• Setting and era: where and when.
• Tone: e.g. cinematic, documentary, playful.
• Length and format: e.g. 30 seconds, 16:9 for a screen, 9:16 for Reels.
• Audience: who is watching, and what they should feel or understand.
• The look, locked: colour palette, light (e.g. "golden hour, warm, soft shadows"), and one visual reference ("premium nature documentary").

Set the aspect ratio here, before generating. Converting a 16:9 clip to vertical later means cropping out half of what you paid for.

Step 3: Turn the story into a shot list

Most AI video models produce clips of 5–10 seconds, sometimes up to around 30. A 30-second video is not one prompt. It's four to six shots, each one generated separately and edited together.

Write them down before you start: shot number, length, what happens, camera position. My student's first video needed seven tries per shot because there was no shot list. Each generation was a guess about how it would connect to the others.

One shot, one camera movement. If you ask for "a drone view that then becomes a side view", most models will do neither well. Split it into two shots.

Step 4: Write prompts with the four essentials

Every good video prompt names four things: subject, action, setting, camera. Add light and lens once you're comfortable.

Professional film vocabulary works better than everyday description, because these models learned from professional footage. "Slow dolly in", "low angle", "shallow depth of field" and "golden hour" all mean something precise to them. "Make it look epic" doesn't.

Remove every vague word. "The same person as before" means nothing to a model that has no memory of before. Describe them again, or better, give it the same reference image.

Step 5: Keep characters and products consistent

The biggest beginner frustration is a face or a product that changes between clips. The fix is to create reference sheets before generating your shots:

• A character sheet: one image of your person from the front, side and back, with close-ups of the face and outfit and a note of what must never change.
• A location and product sheet: the same idea for your setting, your product and any object that appears in more than one shot.

You then attach these images to every prompt as references. It feels like extra work. It's the reason the final video looks like one film instead of six.

Step 6: Iterate one change at a time (and protect your credits)

When a clip isn't right, the instinct is to rewrite the whole prompt. Don't. Change one element (the camera, the light, the action) and regenerate, so you know what fixed it. Also watch the whole clip before judging it; the first frame often looks wrong and the rest is fine.

To keep costs down, use a simple budget rule:

1. Explore cheap: try your shot a few times on a faster, cheaper model.
2. Refine the winner: make small changes to the best version only.
3. Render once on a premium model when the prompt is settled.

Step 7: Edit, add sound, export

You don't need editing software for a single clip. For anything longer you'll stitch clips together, trim them and add music or voice. CapCut is free and enough for most professional social content. Some generators now include basic editing and generated audio, which keeps everything in one place.

Which AI video tool should a beginner use?

There's no single best tool, and the leaders change every few months. What matters is choosing one platform to learn first:

Tool	Good for
Venice.ai	Trying several image and video models in one place, with a strong privacy focus. What I use with most students.
Runway	Polished, cinematic multi-shot work with built-in editing.
Kling / Seedance	Realistic motion and consistent characters using reference images.
Google Veo	Clips with generated sound.
HeyGen / Synthesia	Talking-head avatar videos from a script.

Referral link: I may receive credit if you upgrade. I only recommend tools I use with paying students.

The 5 beginner mistakes that waste the most money

1. One-word prompts. Always name subject, action, setting and camera.
2. Expecting one prompt to make a whole video. Plan short shots and edit them.
3. No Story Bible or shot list. Every clip invents its own style.
4. Rewriting everything when one thing is wrong. Change one element per attempt.
5. Picking the format at the end. Set 16:9 or 9:16 before generating.

What this looks like for real work

A marketing director I coach needed a short video for his company's sponsor stand at a design event in Milan, with no film crew and no budget for one. Over a few weeks he went from seven-clip experiments to a finished split-screen piece his CEO approved after nine seconds of viewing. The tools didn't change during that time. His method did: Story Bible, locked look, shot list, reference images, one change at a time.

A filmmaker quoted in Runway's guide estimated a 95-second AI documentary would have taken six months to a year the traditional way. You don't need to be a filmmaker to get that leverage. You need a process.

FAQ

Sources: Runway: How to make AI videos for beginners (generation types, prompt components, beginner mistakes, filmmaker estimate). Method, Story Bible and reference-sheet process from my own coaching work. Tools and clip lengths as of October 2026.