Making Three Explainer Videos in a Day using Artificial Intelligence Tools
Article Video: Walkthrough of Creation Process
There are many short videos on Youtube that explain and describe everyday terms. What if you could create your own explainer videos without much effort? I decided to try it myself and made three explainer videos in only one day using generally available and cheap artificial intelligence tools.
The Topics for the Explainer Videos
The first video is about dry cleaning, and the second is about "kayfabe," a term from pro wrestling. The third video tries to answer whether vomiting is good for you. The videos turned out quite all right. They are not sensationally good or inspired, but - you know what - they are perfectly serviceable.
I made these videos with zero creativity and zero research in record time. I did not write any of the scripts myself but used an AI tool and only made slight tweaks to the text. I did not narrate the voiceovers but used an AI narration reader. I did not shoot a second of footage but used cheap stock footage. I did not render a frame of 3D video but used an automated online service.
The Tools Used To Create the Videos
Let's see how I did it and how good these tools are. These are the tools I used:
Jasper AI at https://www.jasper.ai is an online copywriting assistant. You give it a couple of cues and keywords about the topic you want to cover. After a moment, it writes a few paragraphs based on your input. If you enter a question, then Jasper generates several suggestions. And this is exactly what I did. For example, I asked Jasper, "What is Kayfabe?". A few moments later, I got a long paragraph with the answer.
Next, I wanted to turn this text into a voiceover for the video.
Natural Reader at https://www.naturalreaders.com is a tool for natural-sounding text-to-speech. You feed your text into Natural Reader, pick a male or female narrator, and US or UK pronunciation. Then Natural Reader generates an MP3 file with the voiceover narration. For one of my videos, I picked a male US voice, and for the other two, I chose a female voice with British pronunciation. Please note that only the slightly more expensive commercial plan allows you to use the voiceovers on Youtube.
Then I moved on to the footage I needed for the full video. I knew that I needed an intro with the titles and an outro with the logo.
Viddyoze at https://viddyoze.com is an automated service for generating 2D and 3D videos like titles, intros, logo reveals, credits and outros. You choose from a large selection of templates and customize them. Depending on your chosen template, you can enter a text, upload a logo and customize the colors. Viddyoze then generates the video, and you can download it to add it to the video editing application of your choice.
I generated the titles for the intros and a standard outro with the Eyenessness logo I whipped up in a short time. Now that I knew how the video started and ended, I needed some footage to accompany the voiceover.
There are many stock video services on the web that offer high-quality footage. Some, like Adobe Stock, Shutterstock and iStock, charge comparatively high prices for individual video clips. I knew that I could find similar footage at a lower price from the subscription-based services StoryBlocks at storyblocks.com and Videvo. at videvo.net.
In StoryBlocks, you enter keywords and are provided with a large selection of video clips matching your subject. Most stock videos on StoryBlocks and Videvo are suited for business and marketing use. They range from slice-of-life like people shopping, talking to each other, cooking, or enjoying life. They also cover business meetings in conference rooms, people working at computers, on construction sites, etc. Both StoryBlocks and Videvo offer competitively priced subscriptions that allow you to download as many video clips as you need. StoryBlocks has two advantages.
On the one hand, you can find stock music and sound effects. On the other hand, StoryBlocks integrates seamlessly with LumaFusion, the powerful video editing app for iPadOS and iOS. For the kayfabe video, I couldn't find suitable footage of pro wrestlers on StoryBlocks, so I used Videvo. I picked an intro stinger from the music selection on StoryBlocks, some sound effects, and a short piece of music for the background score of the narration.
Now that I had all the necessary components, I started putting the video together.
Assembling the Pieces
LumaFusion is a powerful and versatile video editing app for iOS and iPadOS. It is a delight to use. The app is surprisingly reasonably priced, considering how powerful it is. It can be found at https://www.luma-touch.com and LumaFusion provides 80% of the most common features high-priced professional video applications like Adobe Premiere and Apple's Final Cut Pro offer at a fraction of the price. LumaFusion's main feature is non-linear, timeline-based video editing. You can combine up to 12 tracks of video and audio. You can add titles and overlays, and simple keyframe animations for tweening. You can even stabilize shaky videos and use the powerful color grading feature to correct the colors and lighting of your videos directly from within the application.
Using the seamless integration of StoryBlocks with LumaFusion, I picked suitable stock footage and dragged it into the timeline. Then I added the intro generated from Viddyoze to the start of the video and appended the outro. I added the voiceover narration and picked a piece of music for the video's estimated final length. And finally, I tweaked the size of each clip to match the narration or a particular cue in the musical score.
The editing usually only took me around half an hour per video. When I was done, LumaFusion rendered each video, and I uploaded it to Youtube.
Observations About the Results
I am pretty happy with the results. AI-based storytelling has excellent potential. But as you can see, the available tools already provide rather good results with minimal effort. Jasper AI for the copywriting and script, Natural Reader for the automated voiceover, StoryBlocks and Videvo for stock video footage and music, and a video editing suite like LumaFusion.
To be fair, only Jasper and Natural Reader use AI. Even the video editor and the stock footage sites have some rudimentary logic to accelerate your decision-making.
There are also other tools that I could have used. For example, Speechelo for natural sounding text-to-speech for the voiceover narration and even Lumen5 to generate animated presentations based on keywords and subject matter.
Admittedly, there is much room for improvement, and the final videos are too streamlined. They could be more exciting and lack the personality to be truly professional. Still, given the minimal cost and effort, they communicate the message concisely and effectively.
It is still early days. I, for one, can't wait to see how AI tools will in future enable me to make videos even faster and better videos.