Keeping Up with AI Video

Generative-video tech’s running a full-tilt sprint, and I’ve just felt it first-hand. I’m currently finishing my first “semi-AI” short St Albans—that pairs live-action date-night shots with AI reconstructions of Roman Verulamium—and, before the render dust even settled, Google lobbed Veo 3 into the wild. That one-month gap turned my painstaking workflow into yesterday’s kit bag—yet weirdly I’m still buzzing. Here’s the blow-by-blow.

Rebuilding Verulamium with ChatGPT

I started in early April, using ChatGPT-4o’s shiny new image generator that rolled out 13 May 2024.

Four weeks of prompts, tweaks and re-rolls later, I’d banked a stack of stills that looked convincingly Roman. Every frame had to line up with the live-action camera moves, so compositing was difficult to say the least.

From stills to motion: Kling to the rescue

To animate those GPT-4o renders, I jumped into Kling AI. The platform has evolved since I last looked at it, it’s now capable of two-minute 1080p clips at 30 fps.

Even with Kling’s fancy modes, matching my handheld gimbal shots took umpteen iterations—think 3-4 solid weeks of “generate → reject → tweak → regenerate” loops. Worth it? Absolutely. Kling’s pricing tier + addon credits when needed suprisingly wasn’t too expensive.

Then—bang!—Google drops Veo 3

Mid-May, Google I/O lights up and Veo 3 lands, promising eight-second hyper-real clips with dialogue, ambience and all the Dolby-bake trimmings  . The kicker? It’s gated behind a $249/month “AI Ultra” sub and, as of this week, still geo-blocked from the UK—even after rolling out to 71 new countries  .

So while Veo seems to pop out amazing results, it’s basically at a party I can’t get into (yet).

Quick tips for felllw filmmakers

Here are a few things I learnt from developing this short in the last four weeks

• Lock your concept, not your toolchain. By the time you finish a project, the tech you started with will feel vintage- if you’ve spent time to perfect it, it shouldn’t matter too much.
• Budget for rerenders. Keep credits / cash aside; you’ll want to revisit scenes when the next model drops.
• Archive prompts & seeds. Future-you will thank present-you when upgrading assets to Veo 4 or Kling 3 takes minutes, not weeks.
• Stay sceptical. Viral Veo clips are breathtaking, but early reviews still flag spatial hiccups and buggy UI  .

Final thought

AI video is sprinting like it nicked the Olympic torch. My little time-travel experiment might look quaint next year—but the story and the craft behind it still stand. Tech will keep levelling up; the trick is to let each wave carry your vision further, not wipe it out.