Can AI Develop Your Animated Video?
Investigating Vyond Go beta
Recently, my colleague Matt Kurtin wrote a blog about practical ways to use AI to improve e-learning development. This got me thinking about the many serious ways people are using AI (not including the pure comedic gold that’s produced by artificially generated pranksters… warning, the rabbit hole of fake images is deep).
In his post, Matt mentioned a few tools that can convert text to video. As a graphic designer who creates custom training and performance support materials, I use a lot of different animation tools ranging from After Effects to Vyond to create videos and have been taking note every time a new AI feature gets added. I’m not turning down any help that AI can provide on repetitive tasks (i.e., creating captions in Premiere Pro and generative fills in Photoshop) so I can focus more on creative work. I was particularly excited to learn that Vyond now has AI capability with Vyond Go Beta. Who doesn’t want time-saving help when creating training?
So, join me in my (almost) true investigative journey into Vyond Go Beta. The facts have been changed slightly based on Chat GPT’s advice: “When writing a story based on real people and events, it’s important to protect their privacy by changing their names and other identifying details.”
The Investigation Begins
In his blog, Matt discussed eight ways AI can help with custom e-learning development. I found some of the same ones available in Vyond Go Beta:
- First Draft of Content
- Text to Speech
- Text to Video
At first, I wasn’t sure how much information Vyond Go Beta needed to start creating my videos. It asked me to provide either a topic-prompt or to provide a bulleted list of content I wanted to cover. It also gave me choices for vibe, format, layout, and lot of backgrounds to choose from. I decided to have Microsoft Bing generate content for the below prompts:
- Keeping Computer Security Up to Date
- How to Perform CPR
- How to Play Cello
- How to Make a Grilled Cheese Sandwich
In all four cases, the results were remarkable. I took each of them and fed those into Vyond Go Beta as a detailed script, trying a wide variety of options for the other choices available. All of the outcomes were interesting. Some were amusing. In general, it left me with a sense of wonder about how amazingly fast I’d gone from nothing to a finished video. Not everything was perfect, but one of the coolest things is that after the first draft is auto generated, you can go back and use the regular Vyond tools to refine it. This is a big advantage over some other generative AI tools where you can only edit by having the AI re-create the item again entirely from scratch.
Key Findings
- You don’t have to start from a detailed script like I initially did. You can simply give the prompts from above (e.g., “Keeping Computer Security Up to Date”), and Vyond Go Beta will produce roughly equivalent AI-generated scripts as you would get from Bing. You might also get more targeted results if you skip generative AI for the scripting and write the script the old-fashioned way. Then, you can just lean on Vyond Go Beta for the media parts.
- Vyond Go Beta is really good at taking an informative script and making it sound like a conversation by inserting interestingly phrased questions that reveal the content. It might not win script writing awards, but it sounded well thought out in most cases.
- I liked that Vyond Go Beta added music and intro and outro animations. These were nice touches that made the video feel more cinematic.
- Sometimes the animations that were automatically chosen were a little over the top. For example, a character was sweating because he was afraid that he wouldn’t know how to make the grilled cheese sandwich. Even for someone like me that gets hangry, it was a little much.
To say that AI is having “a moment” right now would be an understatement, and Vyond Go Beta is a worthy tool that belongs in the discussion about what’s possible with AI. For now, I’m keeping the videos I created under wraps (to protect the innocent and the gentleman who really wanted that grilled cheese), but you can give it a try yourself. Your own investigation begins at Vyond Go and Quick Edit. Happy generating!
