Directing a promo video with AI

The first video I made this way was for work, at Vidyard. I’d suggested that a vision film would land the product vision I was helping shape, and I got to go figure out how to build one. That one used a much bigger stack, with Claude tying it together: voiceover from ElevenLabs, characters from Nano Banana, live-action shots from Seedance, music from Suno, all rendered in Remotion.

Yapkit is a library of ready-made ESL lesson plans I built. I wanted something to announce it with on social, and I was curious whether the workflow I’d picked up at work would carry over to something of my own. So I made a sixty-second promo, three tools this time: Claude for the creative direction and the code, Suno for the music, and Remotion, a framework for making video out of React, to render it.

Most of the project was directing Claude. I set what the video should be about and how it should feel: no voiceover, music carrying it, oversized type. I wrote the arc: a teacher on a Sunday night still planning tomorrow’s lesson, then the turn, what if it was already done, then the library answering it. I decided early that the video shouldn’t be a mockup of the product. It should be the product. That let me animate the real elements instead of a flat image, and it meant everything on screen was the actual thing, the real pages and the same code that ships.

Claude was my sounding board for all of it, and then it wrote each shot in Remotion. It can give you a handful of plausible directions for a shot, or turn one into working code in a few minutes. What it doesn’t have is taste. It can’t tell you which direction is right, or how the thing should feel, or whether a shot is landing.

The deciding goes all the way down, even into the smallest details. All the page transitions use the same spring, a little overshoot before the page settles. On most shots it looked fine. On one long scroll it looked cheap, landing with a rubbery wobble. The curve was the same one that worked everywhere else, so nothing was broken. It just felt off. I softened the overshoot on that shot until it settled cleanly.

The music was the same. Getting a track that hit the video’s beats, especially at the beginning where the big words had to land on a note, took a lot of trial and error on the prompt.

I’d made videos before this, in After Effects, where you animate by hand, keyframe by keyframe. Remotion is different. You write the animation in code, and the timeline is only there to scrub the preview. Some basic things took longer. If I wanted to move an element to an exact spot, I’d have to describe it to Claude and wait. But the hard stuff, the kind that used to eat an entire afternoon, was done in minutes.

The tools really have become impressive, and the execution cheap. Work that used to take a team, one person can now do alone.