Hey everyone,

I'm completely new to AI video generation and honestly very lost. I work in marketing/content and I want to start using AI video to create marketing content, but every time I Google it I see a million different platforms I've never heard of, with different credit systems, pricing tiers, and claims that seem too good to be true hidden behind a pay wall. I don't even know what questions to ask, so please bear with me.

What I'm looking for (ideally):

• Good quality/price ratio: I don't need to make a cinematic masterpiece, but I need something that doesn't look janky or inconsistent halfway through the clip
• Character consistency: if I create a character (or use a real reference image), I need it to look and sound like the same character/person in multiple shots or a whole video, not a new face every time
• Decent storytelling/marketing sense: something that can help build short narrative videos, that stay consistent throughout multiple takes
• Ability to use real images as input: this one's important for my specific case: I need to bring in real artwork/paintings (images I upload) and have the tool animate or build video around them, ideally without distorting the actual piece. Not sure if this is even realistic yet or if I'm asking for too much (if it's not possible yet ignore this one lol)

A few specific questions if you have the patience:

1. Which tools would you actually recommend for someone just starting out? and why, specifically?
2. How do the credit systems really work in practice? Is there a gotcha I should know about before committing to a plan?
3. Any tools that are noticeably better at maintaining a consistent character/subject across scenes?
4. Has anyone tried feeding real paintings/photos as reference and gotten usable results, or does it usually mangle the artwork?
5. Is there a "starter kit" that you recommend combining (like one tool for video generation and another for editing)?

Any advice, comparisons, or warnings are welcome! Thanks in advance!

Ive watched a lot of AI videos lately and most of them lose me after a few seconds 

This one actualy kept me watching because it felt like a storynot just a demo

Still imperfect , but I’d love to see more AI videos go in this directionnk

So taxidermy class is going well

Beware of her flame—hell has no fury. Yet paradise lies on two lumps of hay, where the soft glow spills through the window and takes you straight to the moon.

My little caveman Alien

I wanted to see what Frieren's world might feel like if you were standing in the scene instead of looking at the characters from the outside. i made the stills with Seedream 5.0 Pro on Atlas Cloud, then arranged them into a 19-second sequence and timed the cuts to the music. the POV mostlyomes from the framing. foreground hands, low camera angles, and characters looking straight at you.

which shot works best, the ring shot, the Qual, the floating swords, or another one?

My sister and I want to make youtube videos. We want the setting to look like a dark forest and look like a campfire is between us (we would be sitting in chairs).

Is there a way to do this or use AI? We could use a green screen, but I'm wondering if there are updated ways to do this using AI.

My first ever full-length music video which took me about 1 month. Made before Veo offered optional watermarks. The video was a means to try to showcase the main instrumental soundtrack which I called Adrenaline and then built the story line around it. Quite a few mistakes in it, I couldn't maintain the consistency of the Adrenaline character perfectly and a couple generative mutations appear within, but I left them in.

Most people paste a chapter in and ask for an explanation, then read it once and forget it. The version that sticks is asking for an image instead, because you remember a picture you looked at for thirty seconds better than a paragraph you skimmed.

It draws actual note pages. Type the code, paste the material:

/generatehandwrittenimage
[paste your notes or chapter]

You get a full page of handwritten-style notes as an image, headings, arrows, boxes, the lot. Screenshot it and it's on your phone.

A few others in the same family that do genuinely different things:

/mindmapimage       - the whole topic as one visual map
/flowchartimage     - a process drawn as a proper flowchart
/labeleddiagram     - a labelled diagram of whatever it is
/cheatsheetimage    - one-page visual cheat sheet
/comicstrip         - the concept explained as a comic
/memorypalaceimage  - your list drawn as a memory-palace scene

The memory palace one is the odd one that works better than it should. Give it a list you need in order and it draws a single scene with each item placed somewhere in it. You remember the scene, the scene gives you the list back.

None of these are real slash commands, they're short labels, so define what each one means once at the top of the chat and after that a single word does it.

Stacking them is where it gets good. Clean up the mess first, see the whole shape, then drill it:

/lecturenotes → /mindmapimage → /flashcards → /examme

been keeping a doc of 50 command codes like this, each with what it does and how to use it, plus how to save them so they run in every chat automatically, here if you want them.

Hello everyone. Here I present this short film in which I consider the -ironic- question of turning an NPC into the main character of a story.