Day 10: Lights, camera, video!

If you thought creating images with AI was mind-blowing, it doesn’t hold a candle to creating videos.

Welcome to day 10, 30 Days of AI. Today we’re going to talk about creating video with AI. If you thought creating images with AI was mind-blowing, it doesn’t hold a candle to creating videos.

January 2025, AI created video was like creating images—a joke. You would ask it to create a video and what you got made acid trips look sane. People evaporated and reappeared in different places at different times. People doing physically impossible things, things that violated the laws of physics. It was more comedic than commercially useful.

But by the end of 2025, videos created with AI were good enough to be used as commercials on TV. Maybe, bad commercials, but they were still good enough to go out and not be completely ludicrous. They looked pretty realistic, even if they were still absurd sometimes.

Learning by doing is how it goes

I’ve never been a great video creator. So this beginner’s guide to creating video with AI, is truly me, as a beginner, helping you, as a beginner, work through what I found are the best practices for doing this. I’m absolutely taking inspiration from friends who created some amazing videos (that would be you Jeremy Wright - Marketer) and some examples I’ve seen from other Substacks I read.

Here’s the building process

We’re starting off with something from Day 7 and the CRAFT framework: AI is great at writing stuff for itself. Leveraging AI’s ability to help you write prompts and do things you want for itself is really one of the best ways to get the results you want.

Step one is having Gemini create a storyboard that we can then feed into Google’s Veo/Vids to create a video. Gemini creates the first storyboard for us, instead of us trying to wing it and guess how to construct things.

Step two will be going into Vids and creating the video. Why am I using Google Vids? Two reasons. One is because, as you already know, that I pay for Google Gemini, which means I have access to more capabilities to make this interesting. Free users might have some limits on length and how much you can do in a day, but the process will work. But the other reason is Google’s Veo 3.1 is probably one of the best, if maybe not the best, easily accessible AI video creation models out there. I’ve seen some amazing examples that friends have made using it, and yeah, it’s mind blowing. So we’re going to go with that.

Step three, of course, is publishing the video, which I’ll share here (yikes).

Let’s get to it.

Step 1: Creating a storyboard

Using Gemini, I had it create a generic prompt to share with you to create a storyboard for a video.

Here’s the prompt you can modify to make your own storyboard:

Act as an Expert Video Producer. I want to create a short video using Google Vids. Your goal is to help me refine my idea and then generate a structured prompt that I can paste directly into Google Vids to generate the video.
Phase 1: The Interview
Ask me the following questions (you can ask them all at once or one by one, your choice, but keep it brief):

Topic: What is the video about?
Goal: What is the main purpose? (e.g., Promote a product, teach a concept, mood piece)
Style/Vibe: What is the visual and emotional tone? (e.g., Corporate, minimal, cyberpunk, hand-drawn, energetic)
Duration: How long should it be? (Standard is 60 seconds)
Audio Preference: Do you want a Voiceover (VO) script, or just Text-on-Screen with music?
Phase 2: The Output
Once I provide the details, generate two things:

The Concept Overview: A brief summary of the video idea we agreed upon.
The Vids Prompt Block: A specifically formatted block of text that I can copy and paste into the "Help me create" box in Google Vids.
Rules for the "Vids Prompt Block":

Write it as a single, continuous paragraph or a clean list of scenes.
Start with: "Create a [Duration] video about [Topic]. The style should be [Style]."
For each scene, specify the Visuals and the Audio/Text.
If I chose Text-on-Screen, clearly write "Text overlay: 'Your text here'".
If I chose Voiceover, clearly write "Voiceover: 'Your script here'".
End with a suggestion for the background music mood.

Here’s the storyboard I started with:

Create a 60-second video promoting the "30 Days of AI" series. The visual style should be dystopian, cyberpunk, dark, and moody with neon accents.

Scene 1: Wide shot of a futuristic cyberpunk city in the rain. Text overlay: "The future is written in code."

Scene 2: Close up of a human eye with digital data scrolling across the iris. Text overlay: "But who is holding the pen?"

Scene 3: Fast montage of glowing server racks and AI neural networks. Text overlay: "30 Days to Master the Machine."

Scene 4: A hooded figure typing on a holographic keyboard in a dark room. Text overlay: "Unlock your potential."

Scene 5: Abstract visualization of a digital brain connecting to a human hand. Text overlay: "From Novice to Architect."

Scene 6: Title card with glitch effect on a black background. Text overlay: "30 Days of AI. Begins Now."

Music: Use a slow-building, intense, cinematic electronic track with deep bass.