How to Make a Spec Ad with AI and Premiere (Full Workflow)

Hey, what's up, Josh? You got a second? Hey, what's up, man? So I just ran into the CEO of my favorite outdoor company, and I really want to work with him. Okay, what's the company and what's the game plan? All right, so the company's name is Zorali, and I ran into the CEO, his name's Cam. After talking to him, he said, cool, okay, send me an idea, and then send some examples of work that you've done. That got me going, because now I really want to hit this out of the park. Okay, cool, do you have an idea for an ad, then? Oh, 100%. The literal day that I bought my backpack from them, I had this idea. This is a no-brainer, then. If you want to hit this out of the park, all you gotta do is send him over a spec ad along with your full portfolio. Okay, well, I can't do that, bro, because spec ads are really expensive, and work's been really slow, so I can't pay a crew a location, an actor, I can't pay craft services all on just like a maybe. And also, I want to get Cam something back quick before he forgets who I am. Hey, bro, so I get it, but here's the thing. You're actually listing a lot of things that you actually don't have to pay for anymore, because guess what? You can actually make a spec ad with Generative AI first. After you make your spec ad, you can get that approval and have your client say yes, and then after that, then you can take their money, and then you'll have the funds to actually pay for the crew, pay for the location, pay for actors, pay for the insurance, the craft services, all of that, and it's so much easier. The thing that has made AI video look like garbage for so long was the fact that it just seemed to forget itself. You'd spend all this time generating a main character, like a guy, for one scene, and then you go to the next shot, and his face has changed. Like, the lighting has changed, his jacket has changed. It just completely drove you mad. But here's the cool thing. In the last couple of months, a solution has been finally birthed with the rise of AI agents, and these agents take over that heavy, mental, creative burden that we're just talking about over for you, and it changes your life. The one that we're gonna be trying out today, bro, is NVIDIA's Agent 2. So what is this idea that you had? So the brand is all about getting outside into nature, and I was thinking about one of those open office spaces that sucks the energy right out of you. And there's this guy sitting at his computer, clearly drained, and then he gets an email that says his time off has been approved, and to enjoy his journey, which is a play onto their tagline, The Journey Calls. Next, we see the guy's face light up, and he smiles, and then there's an instant match cut, and we zoom out to see him in a beautiful hillside with mountains all around him in full Zorrelli gear, wearing the backpack that I purchased. He then walks off, and the screen fades to black with their logo and timeline. Perfect, let's build it. All we gotta do is we gotta create a brief first, and then we gotta figure out what the products and the outfit are gonna be that we're gonna use in the video. Oh, hey, I actually already have that, and I was actually gonna send it in my email. All right, perfect. You're gonna be the one to get in the chair and drive. I'm just gonna guide you. Okay, it's open. Zorrelli brief's in. The product photo and outfit are in. Now what? I just tell it to make a video? That's not how it's gonna work. You're gonna literally tell it what you're making. You're not gonna just say, make a video. It's gonna be a big difference. Watch. All right, cool. So right now, I'm gonna write that I want to create a short ad for the outdoor brand Zorrelli, and attached is the treatment, the products, and the outfit that I want my main character to wear. Okay, so now you see it's processing. Okay, it's doing its stuff. Dispatching Darren character master sheet. Who's Darren? All right, so Darren, yep, that's our guy. He is the office worker. What you do is you name him so the AI keeps him consistent. That's the whole trick. It's building his character sheet first by itself before it touches a single scene. You need that character sheet because everything leans on him, so locking him in before anything else is crucial. Huh, okay, well, I made a character sheet, five angles of the same dude. Yep, the character sheet is your continuity backbone right there. Now, any shot that you build, he shows up as the same person. That used to be the thing that was so difficult to do when you're doing AI workflows, and sometimes it was impossible. Okay, but Josh, look at him. He looks like a 40-year-old dad, and I wanted this to be a young boy, mid-20s, scruffy, the type of person who's actually drained from sitting in an office all day. Okay, then tell him that then. That's the part that people miss. You don't have to accept the first thing. You direct it. You have the power, and actually, do me a favor. Tell it to actually ask you questions before it just runs off and builds stuff. You can do that? Yeah, you can do that. It actually stops it from guessing wrong twice. Okay, I'm gonna type, no, Darren needs to be mid-20s, youthful and tired of being in an office all day. Before making decisions, ask me some questions first. Okay, now watch. Okay, so it's asking me stuff. It's asking, what is his vibe? How should the office tiredness read on his face? Keep the button down or go more casual? See, now it's directing stuff with you instead of at you. So now answer it. Okay, let me put in scruffy, creative, a bit undone, dead-eyed, and drained for the tiredness, and casual. Tee or hoodie, not the business shirt. Good, that is a real character note. That is you now doing your job with just words. All right, a new render is coming in. That is way better. This is the guy. But Josh, the skin looks a little, I don't know, plasticky. Like the color grading screams AI. Yeah, you caught it. Good job. That's the tell that makes people, clock is fake, basically. You don't ever let that slide. Tell it exactly that. Skin tones and color grading look AI. Let's not make that mistake again. This needs to be photorealistic, like it was shot on Cinema Camera or high-end DSLR. Oh, that's nice. This actually looks like footage now. Shot 1.2, that is gonna be your guy. Lock that. Now here's what I want to do. Don't build all of these shots in order. I want you to build the riskiest shot first. Why, shouldn't I start at the beginning, though, of my script? Like, shouldn't I start at the office? No, bro, you do the riskiest shot first because the whole film is resting on one bet, specifically the match shot that you have right in the middle. You have one face in the office and you want to connect it with an identical same face in that first shot outside on the mountain. If that shot doesn't hold, then nothing else matters. So you gotta prove it first, and if it works, then building the rest out is easy. Okay, so I guess I'll tell it to build the mountain reveal shot first, then. That's gonna be our hero shot. It's gonna be Darren, the guy that we named, on the ridgeline, dripped out full with his rally gear. This is his first fresh breath in open country. Okay, I'm building it now. Generated with Nano Banana Pro. Okay, look at that. There it is. You got the same guy from the character Locke, Darren, now standing on the ridgeline at sunrise. You got the jacket, the pack, the pants, all reading true. And look, no teal and orange, no plastic skin. That's just a decent golden light shot. That genuinely actually looks good. I should just send this to his rally right now. But I think the framing is off for the match cut. This isn't quite what I envisioned. Okay, then tell it that. Good job. Okay, so I'm kind of getting it now. The scene is spot on. But remember, we're match cutting from a close-in shot of where he's smiling in the office to a close-in shot of him smiling over on the mountain cliff. I think the office shot is gonna have to be his face on the left of the frame, looking at the screen, with his face going from tired to smiling. And that's gonna be the exact framing for our first frame of his face outside on the mountain ridge. And then the match cut's gonna be happening, of course, between those two shots. Okay, this is so much better. This is what I saw in my head. Generation 2.2 is definitely it. Okay, wait, I wanna fix something real quick. Right now, he looks too tired for too long. And the smile's kinda quick. I kinda want it the other way. I want it less time tired, and then I wanna hold the smile in the office before we cut to the mountain. That is a great note. The dwell is what's making it land. And you wanna be with him in the happiness when the world flips. You don't wanna just rush past that. So tell Agent 2 to retime that whole section. Redo the match cut, less time on him looking tired, more time holding the smile in the office before transforming to the outside mountain shot. And look, bro, it's literally just redoing it. It's not starting from scratch. It, like, remembers everything. Yep, that's the project memory. It knows exactly who Darren is. It knows the gear. It knows the cut. It's so cool not having to re-explain the entire movie every time. You're just giving Agent 2 one note like you would to an editor. And that's all you gotta do. All right, check this out. Generation 4.3, the fatigue is like a flash now. And then the smile breaks early and we actually live in it for a little bit before we get to the mountain. This hits so much harder. That's the heart of the piece now, locked. Now it's time to build the rest of your footage around that. We're now gonna create the wide opening shot of the office. Then we're going to get the shots of his desk. And then we're gonna get the shot of the email that starts the whole thing. And then we also gotta get the walk-off shot at the very end. Can it do them all at once? Fire all the shots off right now and just watch what happens. Okay, I'm dispatching four requests right now. Office establishing wide to Darren at the desk, the email insert, the walk-off, and they are all literally rendering at the same time. And check this out. Every one of them comes back with Darren as the same guy, like we said before, same office. It's like the same light logic. Everything is all in context. It's so amazing. I love using AI agents. Okay, edited everything together. To be honest, I'd rather just have each scene and then edit together myself. But let's see what it has done. Okay, this looks good so far. Hold on, look at the email scene. Bro, the text looks really janky. Like it looks kind of terrible. And bro, listen, it's not gonna be perfect every time, but here's the thing. Again, you can talk to it and have it fix it. Let's finish the video first and then have it make changes after that. I'm looking at it still and I'm noticing I'm gonna have to change actually a lot of things, I'm realizing. Look, we need to add a few more people to the left side of the office. And also our starting shot of the office is too static. And then suddenly we cut to Darren and then the text on the computer screen is wrong. Look, I've actually attached a screenshot so you can see it. The final shot of Darren walking off is too short as well. First, we want the scene to actually start with him walking and then we want it to linger for way longer than it does. Like bro, there's a lot of stuff that we're gonna have to fix here. Yeah, it looks like we're having trouble with the email shot. Okay, look, I have an idea. For the email, let's generate an image of the screen with the email on it using Nano Banana, okay? And then we're gonna transition from the mouse click to the email open. But first, let's actually generate the image of the final screen with the email open. That's smart and that looks a lot better too. Let's watch it again now. Okay, this looks good, but I don't want an underlying music track. So I'm gonna tell it that, that I hate the music track. Okay, this new video is better. I'm gonna say that it's actually good, but dude, I really am gonna need to touch this up in Premiere. Tell it to download the 10.4 generated segment and then all of the scenes that were used to make it. Okay, let's do that. I'm gonna right now type in, I want to download 10.4 and all of the scenes used to make it. Okay, it did it. Gave me exactly what I wanted. Let's jump to Premiere. All right, all righty. All the clips are finally in Premiere now from Agent 2. I have all the raw generations. They're all full length, nothing is trimmed, just how I want it. So now I've got a bin full of footage and an empty timeline. Perfect, bro. Well, this is the part that you actually wanted. You said back in the day that you'd rather cut it yourself and this is gonna be where you're gonna do it. So you'd have to just take the edit that the video model handed you. You can take the raw shots like we're doing and build the pacing by hand by yourself. In your opinion, why shouldn't we just use the cut that it gave us? The answer is because pacing is the one thing that these models still really can't do for you that well. What these video models are gonna do is they're gonna generate as many beautiful shots as you like all day long. But when it comes to how long you hold it, when you cut them, when they let these shots breathe, we're talking about the feeling of every shot, they're never gonna quite get it right. So because of that, I almost never let a video model actually touch the final, final polished edit. What I do is I did what we just did. I just pull all the raw clips into Premiere and then I cut it like I'd cut everything. Right, okay, I get it. So I'm just editing now. It's just the normal edit like I would normally do in Premiere. Yep, this is just a normal edit. Just drag your shots around and find the rhythm. The pacing and the power are all yours. Huh, so this is actually the part that I was actually worried about losing, the actual filmmaking part of it. That's right, filmmaking, you've never lost the ability. It just moved, it slightly changed. These AI generations that you've created are your new dailies now. The cut again is still all yours, bro. Okay, I have got a rough cut down now. Pacing already feels way better. But bro, something's bugging me. Okay, what are you seeing? Dude, I'm just like seeing all these wide shots like the office wide, the desk wide, the ridgeline wide shot, and then the walk off. It's all wide. Like it's pretty, but it's kind of a flat look. There's no variety in shot sizes. So the cut I feel like doesn't really have any flow. Yeah, you've definitely gotta break that up, man. Different shot sizing are what's gonna give a cut like it's rhythm. Where do you think it's hurting most? I would say the bit outside is hurting everything the most. Because check this out. He's like standing still on the ridge and then it just cuts to him turning and walking off into the distance. Right now it's just like one continuous wide shot that's holding like way too long. It just drags. Okay, so I guess you need something to cut away to in there. Bro, what do you think the obvious option would be for Azraeli ad? Oh, the backpack. I should be selling the product more anyway, right? I'm gonna have to generate some more closeups of him, maybe adjusting the straps, the back of the backpack. I'm probably gonna want maybe some extreme closeups that I can drop in just to break up that moment between standing still wide again and walking off wide. That is what we call two birds with one stone. Basically what you're able to do is fix the pacing and sell the product in the exact same shots. This we're gonna jump back into agent two and then generate those extra shots that we want. Okay, I'm generating them now. A handful of extreme closeups of the pack. One question, should I make these shots static or moving? Bro, definitely make those shots moving. I think a moving closeup sitting next to your lock off wides is what's gonna give you that dynamic feel. I think in this case, using just static extreme closeup shots would just sit there and die and look horrible. Lateral moves. Okay, I have put them in. I'm dropping them into the timeline now. Okay, that's it. Look at this, he is standing and then it cuts to him adjusting the straps with the camera drifting across that scene to the side. Then it cuts to the back of the pack. Then it cuts back out to wide as he turns and then walks. And then it cuts back out to wide when he enters the scene and then starts walking out into the distance. This whole video has got some life now. Great job, that is your shot variety doing its work. The wide is giving you scope, the closeups give it texture, and the camera move keeps the whole thing from feeling like a slideshow. Hey, one more thing. At the end, I want a Zorrelli logo animation to be playing over the final shot. Think of this as something that can just button the whole piece at the end. But here's the thing, the last shot is just way too short. There's no room for this logo to breathe. Okay, then extend it then. Go back to agent two and tell it to make that last shot longer. You really do want runway for that logo to land. Okay, done. All right, that final shot is nice and long enough now. How do I get this logo onto it now though? So what I would do is I would build the animation. Animation separately. I do the motion graphics in Kling 3.0. You can do that in Agent 2 as well. I think it's a strong model for motion design and it's a bit cheaper than Sea Dance 2. After that, make sure that you're animating the logo over a green background. Okay, so I want the background to be green so I can key it out, right? Exactly. You want to bring that animation then into Premiere, drop the ultra key effect onto it, pull the green out, and then layer over that extended last shot that we created before. That's gonna reveal the logo over that beautiful shot of Darren walking into the sunset. Okay, keying it now. Green is gone. And there it is. The logo animating over the final wide shot as he disappears into the mountains. That is a great ending. I like how this looks. And that is what we call a successful spec ad. Great job, bro. We built it for the cost of a few generations instead of a full shoot, and it's good enough, I believe, to send to Cam. Yo, this really was a great ad. Like, he asked for an idea and some work, and he's getting an actual finished spec ad that he can watch. Now he has a clear idea of what was going on in my head visually. And remember the deal that you just made. Cam is gonna see this. Cam is gonna say yes, and then when the money comes up to shoot it for real, then the expensive part of hiring your crew, etc. All that is gonna be able to come after the yes and not before. Alright, attaching it to the email right now and sending it off. Let's watch it together.