Anyone Can Make Insane Visual Effects Now!

One of the easiest ways to make videos stand out is to use visual effects. If you watch my Friday news videos, they always start with some sort of like random visual effect, and it's probably the thing that I get the absolute most questions and comments about. Not to mention, they're just super fun to make. Now, before I get into this, I don't like to make full-on AI-generated videos. I still like humans to create stuff. So here's a bunch of cool effects that you can make with AI tools And all of these tools are actually publicly available right now. Some of the effects you can do in different tools and will get different results with different tools. But let's just get into it and start playing around with some of them. Let's start with some of those intros that you see in my videos, you know, stuff like this. "Rust!" And stuff like this. I've done a ton of intros that follow that same formula and most of them are done inside of Runway. You can just see I've done a a lot of them now, but I actually start in DaVinci Resolve. So if I open up DaVinci Resolve here, I actually start by recording my video like off of my seat. So here's an example that I'll pull in from my most recent news video, and you'll notice in the very beginning of the video I'm not on camera. I actually hit record by sort of like reaching in, pressing the button while I'm not on screen so that I have a frame of what my room looks like without me sitting in it yet. If I scrub forward a little bit, you'll see I sit down, position myself, and then start talking. So I need 2 still frames from this video to get the effect. So I'll go back to the beginning before I'm on camera, select my timeline, come up to File, Export in DaVinci Resolve, and then take current frame as still. I'll usually save this as like frame 1. And then I come to right before I start talking. So let me zoom in even more on my timeline to right before I start talking here so the transition feels more seamless right into me talking. And I will export another frame here. So File, Export, current frame is still, and then frame 2. Once I have those 2 frames, I then jump into Runway, click on custom on the left side, and then select keyframe. And then it gives you the option to upload the first video frame and the last video frame. So for our first video frame, we're going to upload frame 1, and for our last video frame, we'll upload frame 2. So you can see me without the chair, me in the chair. I'll then give it a simple prompt like, the man bursts through the back wall and then sits down in the chair. I like to use SeedDance 2.0, but there are other models you can use here. The model's actually pretty good, and Google's Vio 3.1 model is also pretty good for this kind of thing. But SeedDance honestly like really kind of tops them all right now. So I'll use SeedDance 2.0, and then you can decide whether or not you want it to output with audio on or off. I always output with audio on because if I don't like the audio, I could just mute it inside of DaVinci Resolve. Also, you can use SeedDance and most of these models in like almost any video generator. So if you're using Runway, you can do it. I believe Krea has all of these. I believe Higgsfield has all of these. I believe Leonardo has most of these. I just mostly use Runway because at some point, like a year and a half ago, Runway gave me a ton of credits to play around with this tool, and I still have a lot of those credits. So that's the main reason I use Runway. But feel free to use whatever tool has these models in it. We'll click Generate, and when it's done, I get a video that looks like this. Now typically I would re-roll it and have it do it again so it doesn't do this little like hard cut from zoomed in on me to zoomed out. But just for demo purposes, I'll show you the next step here. I'll go ahead and download this, jump back into DaVinci Resolve. I'll cut out everything before I start talking here, drag this in, and it should be pretty close. The colors change a little bit, but it's not too bad. And then in DaVinci they have an effect. So if I open up my effects box and then go to video transitions, they have one called Smooth Cut, which kind of cleans up the transition a little bit so it's less noticeable. So I'll zoom in here, I'll take a couple frames off of this side, take a couple frames off of this side here, and then I'll use this smooth cut transition. And you'll notice that here's the— it kind of tries to blend it a little bit better so the transition's less noticeable. And that's how I do most of those intros. There's a few variations that I've tried, like for example, I did this one where a claw machine comes and picks me up here. It lifts me up and then sets me in my chair and then I start talking. The only difference between the other one is I didn't start off frame. I hit record, walked over, sat in the corner of my room, got up, moved to my chair, and then just spliced out everything in between. So frame 1 is just me sitting in my corner and then the final frame is me sitting at my chair about to talk. And here's the exact prompt I used. If you want, feel free to pause and read the exact prompt. Now, another variation was this sort of like anamorph one that I was trying to do, and this is something I still find all of these AI models are really bad at, is starting from an animal and having it like morph into a human. You can actually see as I scrub through these, none of them are that great at morphing from animal to human. I think that might have been the one I ended up using right here. I like this one here where my head's there first and then my body grows out of it.. I did eventually find one that I think worked decently well. And for this one, what I did was I actually started the way I would normally start, me not in a chair at all, walk in, sit down, and then I still exported the first frame without me in it. And also the frame right before I start speaking. I then went over to ChatGPT, uploaded the image of me not in my chair yet, and just said, make a wolf sitting in the chair, make sure to keep the same 16:9 aspect ratio. And it gave me this image. And then I used this image as my starting frame. So you could see Wolf as the starting frame, me as the finishing frame. And then here was my prompt right here. If you want to pause and look at the exact prompt, but that's pretty much how I'm making all of those intros. Here's another thing I love to do if I know I'm going to be shooting in a different location is I like to do transitions to the new location. So for example, a news video I did a couple of weeks ago started like this. In fact, for this one, let's change up the scenery a little bit. So there wasn't a ton of AI news. So for this one, I knew I was going to be up in Big Bear at a cabin recording. So before I left for Big Bear, I actually recorded the first, you know, 5 seconds of this in my office saying, here's the AI news. Let's have a change of scenery. So it was just a little bit of foresight knowing that I was going to be recording in another location. You can see here's my frames, the very last shot from me at my house, and then the very first frame of me talking out in Big Bear. And I just said the camera rotates above the head of the man on the first frame and then rotates around him to reveal the second image. It does it all in one smooth motion and the man does not speak. And I put, and the man does not speak at the end because oftentimes these models will do the transition and then just make me speak like gibberish at the end. So I need to often prompt it like, make sure the person doesn't speak. And this was the output of that. It took it and it just transferred between the two scenes. You can see it's actually a different microphone. I'm holding this microphone here and in this one I'm holding this style microphone and it happened so quick you barely even noticed that the microphone changed. But I also knew to wear the same shirt, so I was wearing the same shirt before I left in my studio. And when I was recording out in the cabin, I made sure to wear that exact same shirt when I was recording. Just to kind of sell the transition. When I found out I was speaking at NAB, they asked me to make some video samples of some of the cool, like, animations I've done and transitions. And I made one and it never ended up getting shown. So here's actually that video that I was going to show at NAB that I'm actually showing for the first time anywhere. I'm currently in San Diego and I need to be out in Vegas pretty quickly here. So I've got a trick. All I got to do is this. Woo! And I'm here. That was easy. So it's always fun to make little transitions like that when you're going from one place to the other. That one was done in exactly the same way I just showed you with this one. The only real difference with this one is that I used the Kling video model instead of SeedDance, and I did it inside of Leonardo instead of Runway because I had credits over there when I made that one. But the process exactly the same. And here's another variation of that same effect. Toss the mic in the air, it sort of slow motion spins and then falls into my hand in the new location. And here's an example of me getting sucked through a wormhole and spit out the other side. Whoa! Here's another one. So yeah, transitions are a lot of fun with AI. It's also fun to make things happen in your video that didn't really happen in real life. Like the majority of the video is something that really happened, but something else going around you didn't happen. For example, I did this intro in one of my videos where I'm talking and a Yeti walks by in the background and I don't acknowledge it or even talk about it at all. It just kind of happens. For these kinds of effects, the best tool right now is probably Google's Omni. So to do this, I would record the first, you know, 10 seconds of me talking in my video here and then take that 10-second clip of me me talking in the video, upload that video here into Google's Gemini, and put a prompt like, "A yeti walks by in the background behind the man." And then you get a clip like this where I'm talking in the foreground and the yeti just walks by in the background, and I splice it into the front of my video just like I do any other video. This was something else I was playing around with in a video from like last week sometime where I had this clip from Google I/O of this band playing. And I thought it would be fun to have Godzilla come in and stomp around in this scene. So I took this video clip, tossed it into Gemini, and said, "Make Godzilla enter the scene and start stomping around." And this was the output from that one. You can also add little effects to the back of your video. Like, for example, I took one of the intros to one of my videos here, and I said, "Add an explosion behind me in the video. Don't change anything else. Make it so I don't even react or notice that happened." Now I have to add that extra bit to the prompt because otherwise, like, I'd turn around and go and act like I noticed it happened. And I want in this particular case to just be like nothing's going on. So for this one, here's an explosion in the background. Here's the AI news you probably missed this week. So for this one, I took that same exact video clip and said, make my head smoking. And so this one, I do my normal intro and there's just smoke coming off of my head. And then here's another one that started as a clip from Google I/O where everybody's just sort of walking in. It's clearly a bright, sunny day. Everything looks nice. The weather's amazing. And I said, take that same video but make it a cloudy and rainy day. But now you can see it's the same location, but it's a cloudy, rainy day and everybody's wearing jackets and holding umbrellas and it totally changed the environment. But the location's exactly the same. Now let's talk about generating B-roll for your videos, because this is something that that anybody who makes videos knows they need from time to time. And sometimes you can't find the exact footage you need on stock video sites. For example, a channel like mine where I share news and articles and curate things, I like to be able to highlight things on a webpage and make it look nice. For that, I actually use a surprising tool that gets the job done, and that's Claude Cowork. So check this out. This is my Claude account here, my Claude Cowork app. And for this, I'm using Opus 4.8. Now, you can use Fable for this, and Fable will probably do a little bit better of a job than Opus. But Opus honestly does the trick. Now, if you scroll all the way up, you can see what my prompt here is. Create a video for me. The video starts with a screenshot of this page. I linked it up to this news article about Claude Cowork is coming to mobile and web, and I want it to zoom down to a paragraph down here that says your work follows you. You start a task at your desk, check out from your phone, pick up the finished output anywhere. I want an animation that starts on this article, scrolls down to that text and then highlights the text for me. So I said, create the video for me. The video starts with a screenshot of this page. It scrolls down to the text that says, your work follows you, etc., etc. It zooms in on the page slightly and then uses a highlighter animation to highlight the text. And then what it does is it actually goes and it screenshots that website and you can see it wrote a bunch of code for me and did a bunch of tasks and used a bunch of tools. And once it was all done, it literally spit out an MP4 video for me. So if I click download and open here, we can see this is the video that it created. There's a little bit of a wonkiness in the image here, but it's not horrible. But you can see I press play and it scrolls down the video for me, zooms in on that section and then highlights it. And that's the whole video. But that's usable B-roll if I'm trying to explain some news and have a nice like little highlight animation. Now, when I used Fable to do the same prompt, it actually did even better. So here's some examples of that. This time I used the redeploying Fable one and you can see the highlight looks a little more natural. And when it animates to different highlight areas, it just feels a little bit smoother, but it's still the same process. It's still used code behind the screen and used screenshots. You can also do things like this where it zooms in and points an arrow at a specific piece of text just like this, or you can do it where it zooms to an area and then highlights that area like this. But you could do those sort of like text B-roll animations for your videos, literally using Claude Code. It would probably work in Codex as well, but I tested it in Claude Code, or I guess Claude Cowork for this example. You can also find that cheesy looking corporate B-roll style video that you'd find on stock video websites. If you don't want to use a stock video website, you can see my prompt here. Stock footage of a man in a business suit shaking hands with a woman in a business suit. While standing in a conference room. And that's exactly what you get. And here's another example of that exact same prompt. I mean, it looks pretty spot on to what you would get out of one of those B-roll websites. Here's one where I have it with a stock B-roll footage. A man sits on a pile of money and scoops it from the ground and excitedly tosses it in the air. Like, come on, that's exactly what you'd find on a B-roll website. Here's another version of that same prompt. So if you need some decent looking B-roll but don't want to use a stock video site, you want to dial it in for exactly what you want. Well, you can use Runway and something like Seed Dance for that, or, you know, Leonardo and Klang or V03. Pretty much any of them these days will make this style stock footage, probably because there's a ton of it trained into the training data already. Another thing you can use AI tools for are text animations and logo reveals. So the way I like to do these is I actually like to do these inside of Codex, but this also works just as well in Claude Code, and you install a skill called Remotion Best Practices. Now, if you haven't seen my video about skills, definitely check that video out. This is one of the skills we kind of deep dive on. But you install this skill inside of Codex or inside of Claude Code. To do that, you open up Codex, go to Plugins, go to Skills up here, search up Remotion, install Remotion Best Practices, and you can use this skill. So I uploaded my Future Tools logo here into Codex and I tagged Remotion Best Practices, so I just type slash and then type Remotion, and then I'll select Remotion Best Practices here. And then I would enter my prompt next to that. There's an explosion of particles, and then the particles reform to become the Future Tools logo, which, you know, is the logo that I uploaded with it. And here's that animation that it created for me. All the particles explode, and then they form directly into that Future Tools logo for me. So that's something that you can use like right at the intro of a video if you want. Here's another version of the Particle logo reveal using my color version of my logo. And here's what this one looks like. You can see it's now colorful, but pretty much doing the same thing. Here's another one I did where I used the Remotion skill. Start from a blank screen, paint splatters all over the screen in the colors of my avatar. The paint drips and morphs into the avatar image, and I uploaded my avatar. And here's the video that that generated. You can see all of the colors splat all over the screen, and then they sort of rearrange and form into my avatar. You can also use AI to create lower thirds. Remotion does this really, really well. You can also use the video generators to do that, albeit it doesn't always work quite as well. Here's some examples of using Seedance where it spells my name wrong and then says CEO of Busy Bench, where if you look at my prompt here, it's supposed to create a lower thirds saying my name correctly and CEO of Busy Bench. But we can see it did create a sort of green screen background here that if we were to download this, pull it into DaVinci Resolve here. I can actually open this in the Fusion editor here. I like to use the Delta Keyer. So if I add the Delta Keyer in here, come select my background color as green by dragging this over right here. Now if I watch my video, you can see this animate onto the screen like that. And then I can adjust the position like this, position it over here like this, maybe make it a little smaller. And now I've got a little animation. It's It's kind of a bummer that it didn't do the text right because it actually looks pretty good. Here's another example that's even worse. CEO of Busty Bench. But you get the idea. You can prompt it to create a green screen lower third graphic, tell it what you want to say on the lower third, and it might create it. Most likely you're going to have to prompt it like 4 or 5 times before it gets it right. Unless you're just okay being the CEO of Busty Bench. Don't look that up. Now, if I switch the model over to VO 3.1, it actually does a much better job with the text. So, you know, different models are better for different things here. If I pull this one into DaVinci Resolve, there you go, you got a pretty nice looking animated lower third that is just better than what you're going to get directly inside of something like DaVinci. Now, the other option to get this kind of thing is to go back to ReMotion, and ReMotion, it's going to dial in the text perfectly every time because it's using essentially code to make these videos, but it's not going look quite as epic with the animations. So you can see I used ReMotion, gave it the exact same prompt inside of ReMotion, and well, here's the version that ReMotion made. You can see not quite as flashy, but it nailed the text and everything I asked for, and it's got a perfect green screen background. So adding our delta keyer on that one, this one looks pretty perfect as well. If you want to animate text that comes in behind somebody, these days it's not that hard to do it in something like DaVinci Resolve, but you can ask Gemini to do it. Here's my prompt for that. And it made a video where the Future Tools text animates in behind me instead of in front of me. Maybe I want to do a fun little like thought bubble. I can use a prompt like this one right here and you get a video where I'm sitting here and now I'm thinking everyone should really subscribe after this one. So yeah, AI is great for your logo reveals, animating images onto the screen, putting text behind you, putting thought bubbles, adding lower thirds. You can do all of that with AI. It's just sometimes it might take you more than one prompt to get it looking the way you want. But if you really don't know your way around a video editor like DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere, this is a pretty easy way to get what you're looking for without needing to go and hire a separate editor. Another thing that AI is getting better and better at is doing like these animated motion graphics. Like the best way I can sort of describe them is the type of things you might see in like BuzzFeed or Cleo Abrams or Johnny Harris style video. Now they're not as good as if you were to hire somebody and do them in After Effects yourself, but you can get some fairly decent style motion graphics. For example, here's one that I did with ReMotion inside of Codex where I basically asked it to create like a mock text message exchange. And here's what it gave me. We can see it looks like an iPhone. It says, have you subscribed to Future Tools yet? No, why? Because it's literally how people are keeping up with AI news these days. Oh, okay, that's how they're doing it. Just subbed, thanks. Like, this exact text exchange would probably work decent as an ad to get people to go subscribe to the newsletter. If you're telling a story about a text exchange that you had on a video, well, you can use this kind of animation for that. If you want to see the exact prompt I used, feel free to pause and take a peek, but, uh, it works well for that kind of thing. Another example is if you're trying to explain a complex topic and you need a sort of visual to go along with that explanation. Like, when I gave it this prompt, prompt here to explain what SVG images are and how SVG actually uses code. It generated this video here showing that the code is what turns into the image. Or this one here, we're explaining how my Gary Busey leaderboard works. I mean, it's a pretty decent little animation, especially when you know the context of the rest of my video. Now, another good way to get some of these motion graphic type things is to use NotebookLM. LM. You could actually feed it a bunch of documents on the topic that you're trying to explain. And inside of Notebook LM, you can do things like create audio podcasts and slide decks and things like that. But there's also this video overview feature here where you can have it create cinematic overviews or explainers or shorts. And in this case, with this sort of birds aren't real one that I've played with in the past, you could see that it made this animation for me that looks pretty good. Now I can scroll through this and there's parts of animation that would make for a great video on this topic. Like, here's a funny chart that it made about drones going up as the amount of birds are going down. Here's one that explains that the birds get their energy by sitting on telephone wires. And here's like a really cool animation of a guy holding a bird. Like, if I was making a legit video about this topic, the animations that NotebookLM creates around the sources that you feed it are actually really good animations that are very usable for B-roll. Jumping back to Codex here, another really useful animation style, especially if you're doing an explainer video or like a mini doc or something like that. You might want to show some graphs. Here's one that shows NVIDIA's stock chart growth. That again, another really solid animation that can be used if you're making a video about NVIDIA's growth. Now, one thing that's been sort of hit or miss and I haven't really got it to work that well is I want to get this visual of like like a plane going from one city to another that might work really well for like a travel video, except all of the video generators are kind of pretty bad at it. So here's what SeedDance does. You can see that here's my plane starting in the state of Sklinké and it flies over Ee, over the state of Nrra and Dirk and Bradu and lands somewhere near Navolrk when I told it to go from San Diego to New York. And yeah, you could just see it's, it's not great. Here's my second attempt. Maybe a little bit better. Like, San Diego is not here, it's way down here. But you can see this video, it sort of flies over the state, sort of weaves up, and then overshoots New York a little bit. I mean, better than the last one, but still not super accurate. I tried to get the same thing to work over in Gemini using the Omni model, and we got a similar issue. It did start in San Diego. It flies across and it does seem to land kind of where New York is. My main complaint about this one is like halfway through the video you could see it sort of like fades out and sort of goes backwards, right? So right here we're over like Nebraska area, right here we're over Illinois, but then all of a sudden we're back over Arizona again. So it sort of has this weird blip in the middle of it., but the starting and ending are a lot more accurate than the other options I got. But the best one does seem to be using re-motion in Codex. But again, it's just not quite as cool looking. Here's what that one generated. You can see it's just an arrow and it flies from San Diego to New York. It kind of takes this weird upper arc instead of just kind of shooting it across in a straight line, but it's definitely the most sort of accurate city to city of them all. So depending on what you're going for, try some options. If you're going to use one of the AI models, and not, you know, a code model like Remotion, you might have to prompt it a few times before you get what you're looking for. Okay, there's one last video type I want to talk about because it was another little trick that I used in one of my videos, and a lot of people asked me, how'd you do that? So in this video that I released back on May 8th, I sort of broke down this text exchange between Sam Altman and Mira Murati, and here's what that looked like. Sam asked, can you indicate directionally good or bad? Satya and others are anxious. "Directionally very bad." "Okay." "Can you wrap up soon? Lots of pressure from Microsoft for an update." "Sam, this is very bad." And again, I got a lot of questions about how did you actually do that? So what I did was I read the text messages out loud. I just used DaVinci Resolve's audio recorder and just recorded myself reading all of the text exchange. Inside of Runway, they have this feature called Character Script to Video.. And if I select this feature, I can upload an image. So I uploaded this image of Sam Altman that I found. I think it was actually an AI-generated image of Sam because it doesn't really look totally like him. And then under character script, you have the option to type a script or upload audio. So I uploaded the audio of me speaking out this exchange. I did the same thing for Mira Murati. The output looked like this. It was an entire video of one person saying both the lines. Sam asked, can you indicate directionally good or bad? Satya and others are anxious. Mira said, directionally very bad. So both videos looked just like that with the entire dialogue of both. I pulled them into DaVinci, my editing software, and I just edited them having the conversation back and forth. I find little stuff like that keeps people engaged in the videos longer. If it was just a video of me just rambling and talking about the news for the entire video, people tend to check out and tune out. So when I do stuff like this, it tends to get people to stick around and watch videos longer because they're always waiting to see like what little fun Easter eggs or toys or tools am I going to throw in to make the video more entertaining, more interesting to watch. And those are some of the ways that I use AI to create visual effects inside of my videos to keep them exciting and intriguing and fun and entertaining. And also, let's be honest, I'm doing it to entertain myself. Like I have a lot of fun. Figuring out what tools to use and how to get these different things to make the animations that I'm looking to get them to make. And it's a really enjoyable process. Now, I know this video probably wasn't for everybody. There's a lot of people that come to my channel and tune in for the AI news that I put out every Friday. And well, this wasn't that, but there's also a lot of people that probably want to learn how to do some really fun little things with AI video tools to improve their videos. That's who I made this video for. I mean, you can use these AI video tools to create slop that no one wants to see, or you can use them to add little touches of spice to your own videos and really grab that attention. Me personally, I still prefer to make 95% human videos and use AI about 5% of the time. And again, it's more just to inject a little bit of fun and silliness into the video and not to like be the video itself. If I'm being honest, I'm not really looking forward to a world where everything we see online has very little human involvement. Like, I'm already getting on a lot of these platforms and noticing that I'm having a harder and harder time telling what's actually AI and what's not anymore. And I don't really like that. So when I use AI, I almost like purposely show off that it is AI. So nobody's wondering if this was done with AI or not. But that's just sort of the style that I like doing. But that's what I got for you today. Hopefully you found this helpful. Hopefully you learned something. If you like videos like this and you actually want to learn practical, actually useful ways to leverage these AI tools that are coming out, I try to make at least one video a week where I'm showing you how to use these tools and how to implement them in your business or your life. And I'm also making at least one video a week where I break down all of the AI news that I think you need to know. I drink from the fire hose all week. I get sort of overwhelmed by all the AI news so that you don't have to. And then every Friday I break down just the most important AI news that I think the most people would want to know. If those are the types of videos that you think you'd enjoy more of, consider liking this video and subscribing to this channel. I'll make sure that kind of stuff shows up in your feed and that you'll always feel looped in. Thanks so much for hanging out, nerding out with me on this one. It's always fun when I get to make videos like this. So hopefully you enjoyed it. If you want to see more of them, let me know in the comments. Thanks again. Hopefully I'll see you in the next one. Bye-bye.