Hello! and welcome to AI Lost Media’s Gen 2 tutorial! In this post I’ll be giving some tips and tricks to get started with Gen 2. In this tutorial we’ll be taking a look at the creation of Pizza Nuggets and Burger Blast, with basic workflow and some example prompts that you can hopefully take to make your own fake AI commercials.
So first things first, you’re going to want to head over to the runway site at app.runwayml.com and get signed up there. Each video comes out to 4 seconds and each second of video is 5 credits and the free plan starts you off with 125 credits so… You’re only going to get about 25 seconds of video with the free plan. Just want to make that clear. You’re probably going to need to sign up for at least the standard plan to really make this work.
So getting started with the project, we need to come up with the basic idea. Now obviously each person’s idea is going to be their own but will walk you through my process.
Idea Creation/Brainstorm
So initially when I came up with Pizza Nuggets, I was impressed by the reception Pepperoni Hug Spot was getting and was noticing that people wouldn’t stop talking about the uncanniness and creepiness of the video, how it was something you would see on Adult Swim, so that was something I wanted to extrapolate on. I suppose looking at Adult Swim commercials or shorts, Too Many Cooks being a great example, there’s a tendency for things to start out normal and to slowly start flying off the rails. And I didn’t want it to just be Pizza because I thought that would be too similar. And finally I wanted to do something set in the 90s because I grew up in the 90s on all these old commercials and I had a pretty good idea of what I should aim for in terms of feel. And a huge memory for me that I couldn’t get away from was a cheesy 90s jingle.
So in summary, the main bullet points I wanted to hit with my video:
Uncanny and creepy
Flies off the rails
Not just Pizza
90s commercial
Jingle
So I’ve brainstormed a few ideas here, and this is where you’re going to want to zero in on your fake product and basic story idea for your commercial. So looking at this here, you can already see the skeleton of the Pizza Nuggets idea, and I hope its not too far of a leap to see how I’ve gone from these basic ideas to the full idea of Pizza Nuggets and that I want everyone to eat so much they turn into a pizza monster.
Product: Pizza Nuggets
Story: Everyone eats too many pizza nuggets and becomes a pizza monster
ChatGPT generated jingle
So now for the jingle. So ChatGPT isn’t something I use all the time but I did use it to create the lyrics for the jingles. If you haven’t used ChatGPT before its super easy. Sign up at chat.openai.com. And it’s really just like talking to an insanely smart person. I’m not an expert gpter but you will be surprised how much mileage you can get out of it by just asking it things you want help with. So I need my 90s jingle for Pizza Nuggets. Here is what I asked ChatGPT
“Hello! Could you write me a cheesy 90s commercial jingle for Pizza nuggets? They are chicken nuggets covered in pizza.”
So it will generate something that’s quite usable, but remember I don’t want just a jingle for pizza nuggets, we have to ask gpt to have the turn where everyone turns into a pizza monster
So I wrote
“ok that's great, now I want to use this as the backing for an adult swim style video where everyone's eating way too much pizza nuggets and eventually they start turning into pizza monsters, could you rewrite from the second verse on to kind of allude to this.”
And GPT did the rest.
I do want to note here that this worked pretty much the first time for Pizza Nuggets, but it could be that your idea is too extreme and will hit their censors. For burger blast I originally wanted to have the franchise mascots be a cult, but GPT wouldn’t do it for me. So in that case I asked GPT for a suggestion.
“Do you have a suggestion then? I do want there to be a twist, and for it to be unsettling. I want there to be a juxtaposition between the happiness of the singing and atmosphere with a sort of descent into the absurd”
To which it responded with the idea of mascots being extraterrestrial aliens attempting to mind control everyone. Your mileage may vary with the ideas it gives you. I was not initially a fan of the alien idea but its grown on me since.
Finding music
OK great, so I have my jingle lyrics, time to get some music for them. Please be sure to have the rights to whatever music you’re using, don’t want your stuff getting taken down! Of course you can make your own music, or you can use the youtube creator studio music library (note which license the song is listed under). For Pizza Nuggets and Burger Blast I found songs on Epidemic sound: for $9 a month you have access to download anything from their library to publish on youtube and instagram. They do have a minute limitation with TikTok, which has led to some difficulties.
And the process for this is you can search for the basic type of song you’re looking for, “90s commercial”, and look around the playlists and topics, filter by mood and genre. I wanted a rock song, they didn’t have rock so I put Indie pop, and then for mood I was sort of stumbling around, I hit on “chasing” because I thought there would be scenes of the Pizza Monsters chasing people. And anyway this takes some trial and error. You basically have to just listen to the songs and try singing the lyrics over them to see what works. Some songs will obviously not work, skip them and you will find something eventually. The song I did end up using was the 8th hit here, and this was probably after a few different filter combinations so, don’t give up!
So we got the lyrics, we got the music, time to sing! I sing my songs but there are AI options out there I’m not as familiar with. Or you can try finding someone on Fiverr to sing the song for you if you don’t want to sing. I used Logic to record my vocals.
Generating Video
OK great, so we got our product, story idea and music, it’s time to generate the video. Go on down to app.runwayml.com for Gen 2 and we’ll get generating. So my prompt combination for these videos has usually been:
“90s commercial ad shot of [the scene you want], 90s nostalgia”. You may need to add certain directors or artists, phrases like “live action” or “animation” to get the exact effect you want.
So this does get pretty specific depending on where I am in the story of the commercial. There are just generic shots like “People eating pizza nuggets” or burgers, but I’ll list some examples of specific shots with prompts.
A couple tips!
Keep in mind for these I try a lot of different prompts that just end up not giving good results. Once I hit on one that works, I will generate many of those to use throughout a video. Again generic shots like people eating, or food monsters.
If you aren’t getting the exact shot you want or you want consistency with characters, use an image! This image was generated with Midjourney using the prompt:
“90s live action commercial shot of hamburger chain character mascot with big chin and slicked hair, 90s nostalgia --ar 16:9 --v 5”
then fed into Gen 2 along with the text prompt “90s commercial ad shot of burger blast spokesman with burger on his head singing and dancing, 90s nostalgia” to get these shots
90s commercial ad product shot of very cheesy cheeseburger, quirky atmosphere, 90s nostalgia
90s live action commercial ad shot of people asleep having hamburgers shoved in their mouths, 90s nostalgia
commercial ad of people shoving cheezy chicken nuggets with tomato sauce into their mouths, 90s nostalgia
commercial ad of people covered in fried chicken skin and pepperoni shoving cheezy chicken nuggets with tomato sauce into their mouths, 90s nostalgia
90s television commercial ad shot of burger shaped UFOs in sky above cityscape being covered in Burgers, 90s nostalgia
commercial ad of people turning into animatronic pizza monsters, 90s nostalgia, rob bottin
animatronic pizza monsters wreaking havoc shoving cheesy chicken nuggets into their mouths laughing with tomato sauce everywhere, 90s nostalgia
90s live action commercial ad shot of animatronic burger monsters revealing they're aliens, 90s nostalgia, rob bottin
90s commercial ad shot of sleeping people with burgers on their heads eating burgers, 90s nostalgia
90s live action commercial ad shot of people being mind controlled into eating hamburgers, 90s nostalgia, nightmare fuel
90s commercial shot of hamburger planet with atmosphere around it spinning in outer space, 90s nostalgia
zoom out shot of post apocalyptic cityscape made of cheeseburgers, brown dust, blasted city
90s commercial ad shot of cityscape covered in cheese and tomato sauce
So keep in mind for these 2 videos I didn’t really have a shot script, I would go on with later videos to actually plan out specific shots, and actually have a full script and that would help a lot with staying focused and quicken the process of getting the perfect shot. This isn’t an editing tutorial but I use Premiere. If you are looking for free options Davinci has a pretty robust free editor and there’s also CapCut which is very popular. I would recommend Davinci of these 2.
A final note, for Pizza Nuggets, I had a bit left over of the song without lyrics. I could have chopped the video when the song ended but wanted to give it an ending. In keeping with the theme of things going off the rails, I decided to take a bit from Return of the Living Dead, it’s also a trope thats been used in Resident Evil and I’m sure countless others, where the government just ends up nuking everything. People responded well to this so I decided to make it a theme with every video. So I hope that gave you a pretty good idea of how to make an AI commercial and prompt with Gen2. If you’d like to follow along with a text tutorial I’ll be posting this script to my website and will link below. Let me know in the comments if there are more specific details for a tutorial you’d like to see. I read every comment! I really appreciate everyone watching and thanks so much for being here!
My name’s Joseph! Until next time