Making a Fantasy Short Film with AI Video Tools: Common Beginner Questions

Last week, I was staring blankly at a forest elf illustration I'd made with Midjourney when a thought hit me. What if this elf turned its head, and its cloak fluttered in the wind? That night, sitting at my desk in the HDB living room, I opened a free AI video tool for the first time. I've spent the past month or so trying various things, so here I'm answering the questions that keep coming up in blog DMs and comments.

Which tool should you start with

I alternated between Runway's Gen series and Pika Labs. Both offer free credits, so there was no need to worry about cost when starting out. Runway's approach of uploading an image and specifying camera movement direction is intuitive. It took me less than 10 minutes to produce my first video. Pika requires you to describe movement through prompts, so it's better suited for people comfortable with text prompts. If you've spent a long time writing Midjourney prompts like I have, you'll pick up Pika more quickly.

Free credits alone are enough to make several short test clips, so you can get a solid feel for things before committing to a paid plan.

The most common failure when turning fantasy art into video

At first, I fed in full-body character illustrations and used prompts like "make it walk." The results were horror shows. Legs multiplying to three, faces melting off. Here's what I learned through trial and error.

• Start with small movements. Hair swaying gently in the wind, or background mist slowly spreading. These produce the most stable results.
• Mid-range compositions distort less than facial close-ups.
• Armour and accessories with intricate patterns shift in detail from frame to frame, making the video look chaotic. Source images with simpler designs yield much cleaner results.

What's a good video length

Most free tools generate clips of 3 to 4 seconds. That might feel short, but it's actually a decent length for conveying a fantasy atmosphere. I stitch four or five 3-second clips together in CapCut, add background music, and create short stories of around 15 seconds. Editing in CapCut on my phone while eating chicken rice at a hawker centre has become my lunchtime routine these days.

How much does it cost

I managed to go a full month entirely for free. When my Runway free credits ran out, I switched to Pika, and when those ran out too, I used beta credits from other new tools. But once I wanted to start making three or four videos a week in earnest, I signed up for Runway's paid plan. It was about SGD 15 per month. Think of it as the price of three or four cups of coffee, and it doesn't feel like much. There's no rush to pay. It's perfectly fine to practise enough at the free tier first.

I've been sourcing music from free libraries, so there are no additional costs yet.

One thing I wish someone had told me when I was starting out: don't upload your source image at too high a resolution. When I fed in a 4K image that had been excessively upscaled, processing time just got longer with no real improvement in output quality. Around 1024x1024 works well with most tools. This was also key to conserving my remaining credits.

In my next post, I plan to cover in detail how to stitch multiple AI clips together smoothly in CapCut. I've already got plenty of material piled up, and my fingers are itching to get started.