Why Stills Are the Right Starting Point

Generating video straight from a text prompt gives you a different character in every clip. Generating video from a still image fixes the character, the setting, and the colour palette first, then adds motion. For a story trailer that consistency is the whole point: viewers need to recognise Pip in scene five as the Pip they met in scene one.

It also splits the work into two steps you can control separately: get the images right (cheap, fast to iterate), then animate only the ones you have already approved.

Step 1: Pick Five Scenes

A trailer is not a summary. It is a promise. Five beats are enough: a hook, the world, the moment things change, the threat, and the title card. Keep the ending out of it entirely.

• Lead with the single most striking image, not the chronological beginning. You have three seconds before a thumb scrolls.
• Choose scenes that differ visually: one wide, one close, one dark, one bright. Five similar frames read as one long frame.
• Write the narration line for each beat now — one sentence, under ten words. It will shape which image you generate.
• Total length: 25–35 seconds. Longer trailers lose viewers before the title card.

Step 2: Generate One Still Per Scene

If you wrote the story with Story-AI, the storyboard generator already produces a consistent image per scene in a chosen art style — pick the five that match your beat sheet and regenerate any that don’t land. If you are using another image tool, the rules for trailer-ready stills are the same:

Step 3: Animate Each Still

Upload each still to an image-to-video tool and describe the motion. We use ImgVeo for this: paste an image, write a short motion prompt, and it returns a few seconds of video that keeps the original frame as its starting point — which is exactly what makes the five clips feel like one film. The single most useful rule, whatever tool you use, is to ask for one motion per clip:

• Describe the motion, not the image. The model already sees the image; "a mouse in a library" adds nothing, "slow push in toward the mouse" does.
• Ask for 4–6 seconds per clip. You will trim to 3–7 seconds anyway, and longer generations drift further from the still.
• Generate two or three variations of the hook and the turn — the two beats that carry the trailer — and only one of the others.
• Add "no camera shake, no morphing, consistent character" to every prompt. It costs nothing and removes the most common failures.

Step 4: Cut, Narrate, Title

Drop the five clips into any editor — CapCut or the built-in TikTok editor is enough — in beat-sheet order. Then:

For the narration line, the audiobook guide covers voice and pacing; if the trailer has dialogue between characters, the multi-voice guide applies. Export at 1080×1920, 30 fps, and post the same file everywhere — the platforms do not reward re-encoding.