# Prompt and pray

Period: Mar 2023 – late 2023 · Era: 2023 · The Cambrian Explosion

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.

## How it worked

1. Type a prompt in a Discord channel (Gen-2 beta, Pika's `/create prompt -camera zoom in`) or, later, a web composer.
2. Wait one to two minutes for a two-to-four-second, low-resolution clip.
3. Regenerate many times, keep the least broken take, upscale in Topaz.
4. Cut in CapCut or Premiere; voice from ElevenLabs, music from Soundraw or Suno.
5. Gen-2's Director Mode (September 2023) added numeric horizontal, vertical, zoom and roll camera values.

## Why it mattered

It proved generative video could be a public medium (memes, festivals, ads) and set the prompt → many clips → edit loop.

## Why it faded

Pure text gave no control over composition or continuity, and the 2023 text-to-video look was the uncanny-commercial look. Within weeks of Gen-2's July fidelity update, serious creators were generating the image first.

## Tools of the era

- ModelScope text2video (2023): https://huggingface.co/ali-vilab/text-to-video-ms-1.7b
- Runway Gen-2 (2023): https://runway.com/research/gen-2
- Zeroscope v2 XL (2023): https://huggingface.co/cerspense/zeroscope_v2_XL
- Pika (2023): https://pika.art
- Topaz Video AI (2022): https://www.topazlabs.com

## Example videos and posts

- Thank You For Not Answering · Paul Trillo: https://x.com/paultrillo/status/1653408637094866944
- Create cinematic AI videos with Runway Gen-2 · Curious Refuge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uzuk4vraXpA
- Create cinematic AI videos with Pika Labs · Curious Refuge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2VEkTpOlR8

## On the timeline

- [Runway Gen-2](https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/runway-gen2) (2023-03)
- ["Will Smith Eating Spaghetti"](https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/will-smith-spaghetti) (2023-03-23)
- [AIFF 2023 — First Runway AI Film Festival](https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/aiff-2023) (2023-11)
- [Pika 1.0](https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/pika-1-0) (2023-11-28)
- [Topaz Video AI v3](https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/topaz-video-ai-v3) (2022-10)

## Sources

- Will Smith Eating Spaghetti: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ai-will-smith-eating-spaghetti
- Pepperoni Hug Spot: https://www.thedrum.com/news/2023/05/24/pepperoni-hug-spot-just-the-beginning-welcome-the-world-ai-generated-video
- Runway Gen-2 research: https://runway.com/research/gen-2
- The Frost (Waymark): https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/01/1073858/surreal-ai-generative-video-changing-film/
- Director Mode: https://runway.com/research/more-control-fidelity-and-expressibility
- Theoretically Media: Runway Gen-2 ultimate tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqRTBynm2iM
- Theoretically Media: mastering Pika Labs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRT7K3YkPI

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Source: https://aifilmhistory.org/workflows/text-to-video