AI Video Creation Pipeline
Introduction
AI video production has moved from a novelty to a working tool, and that matters right now because it changes what a small team can realistically ship. Work that used to require a shoot, a crew, a location and a budget can be assembled by one person in a few days, which puts video inside the normal marketing and product cycle instead of outside it: concept films that sell an idea internally before anyone commits to a real production, campaign and social creative that can be re-cut for each channel, product explainers, pitch visuals, and quick look-and-feel tests on a new direction. The point is not to replace filming, but to make the visual part of a project cheap enough to iterate on and fast enough to keep up with the rest of the work.
So, we decided to test that end to end on a real project.
This article is the result. Instead of a general overview, we want to share what actually worked for us: the practical lifehacks we picked up, the mistakes we ran into, and the workflow we would recommend to any colleague who wants to produce video with AI. We walk through the whole thing on a real project, so you can see not just the theory but the real generations, prompts, and dead ends behind each step.
Where to look for inspiration
Sometimes you have a task but no idea how to approach it.
The core principle is simple: look for inspiration everywhere. Watch as much cinema, architecture, and painting as you can, and train yourself to notice everything beautiful around you. Creativity feeds on what you consume, so the more visual references you gather, the richer your own work becomes.
On the practical side, Pinterest is our go-to. You can type in almost any query and instantly get dozens of images to build from. It is a fast way to shape the visual direction before you write a single prompt.
Build a moodboard
Once the idea has come and you have gathered enough references, the next step is to collect it all into a moodboard. This is a must. You need the picture in front of your eyes before you start producing.
Into the moodboard we put concrete examples of the angles we wanted. For our product, for instance, we collected shots of a bottle held in the hands, so we would know exactly which framing we were aiming for later. We gather everything in FigJam, so the whole board sits in one place in front of us. Only after that do we move on to production.
Our moodboard for the project, built in FigJam: hiking references, the autumn palette, and the exact bottle-in-hands framing we were aiming for.
Tip: A moodboard is not a mood collage of pretty pictures. It is a planning tool. Collect the exact shots and angles you will need, and your storyboard almost writes itself.
Step 1. Creating the character
Why Midjourney, and personalization
For the heroine we chose Midjourney, because this model handles human faces best and is also great at unusual, atmospheric locations. It is highly artistic, but that comes with a downside: it is not very obedient. Midjourney tends to add a lot of its own interpretation, so you have to run many generations before you get what you want.
One thing that matters a lot in Midjourney is setting up personalization, your profile. You pick the variations you like from the many the model offers, and over time it learns roughly what kind of result you expect. For example, we consistently choose people with realistic skin, visible pores, and a natural look, so the model starts generating more believable content for us.
Building the prompt through a language model
Midjourney understands prompts best in English, so to build one we use a language model, Claude or ChatGPT. We describe the character we want in plain words, and the model turns it into a proper English prompt.
In our case we wrote that we wanted a 20 year old girl with freckles and red curly hair, and specified that it should be a studio photograph on a white background, shot on an 85mm lens, and so on. Then we ran a batch of generations and picked the heroine we liked most.
The heroine we picked out of the Midjourney batch: red curls, freckles, natural skin with visible texture.
Dressing her, and a color fix
Next we decided to dress the heroine, because it is better to build the character sheet with her already dressed. For this we switched to Nano Banana, a far more obedient model that follows the request precisely, though with less artistic flair than Midjourney. We asked it to dress her in a trekking jacket and put a backpack on her back.
Dressing the heroine in Nano Banana: the chosen portrait attached as the identity reference, with only the clothing added.
Then we noticed the orange jacket we had specified was blending in with her red hair, so we decided to change it to khaki. We wrote a short prompt along the lines of “do not change anything in this image, only change the jacket color to khaki.”