Mar 2023 – late 2023
Prompt and pray
Text-to-video: the first public medium, two to four seconds at a time.
The first true video models took a sentence and returned a few seconds of footage. Results were short, blurry and unpredictable, so the craft was in generating dozens of takes and editing the best ones together, which is how the first AI shorts, ads and memes were made.
Tutorials2
Create cinematic AI videos with Runway Gen-2
Curious Refuge · YouTube · Jul 2023
How it worked
- Type a prompt in a Discord channel (Gen-2 beta, Pika's
/create prompt -camera zoom in) or, later, a web composer. - Wait one to two minutes for a two-to-four-second, low-resolution clip.
- Regenerate many times, keep the least broken take, upscale in Topaz.
- Cut in CapCut or Premiere; voice from ElevenLabs, music from Soundraw or Suno.
- Gen-2's Director Mode (September 2023) added numeric horizontal, vertical, zoom and roll camera values.
Example Films2
Related on the timeline4