First off, if you’re new here - welcome! We’ve got a ton of new friends here this week and we’re fired up to keep this thing rolling.
If you’ve followed AI content over the last couple months then you’re probably familiar with the Jesus Vlogs and Yeti videos that reached millions.
Well last week one of our brands struck digital “pay dirt” and went super sonic to the tune of 113k followers, 52M views, and 1.1M likes in just 7 days
Now to give some context here, our team is constantly analyzing and testing new content on social, it’s honestly a habit at this point to launch a page and see how it performs, here’s a short list of some of what we’ve tested over the last few months;
Lego remakes of reality television
Satisfying cutting videos
Yeti vlogs
Sci-fi visuals with podcast clip audio (think Theo Von talking with larger than life visuals)
Haunted explorations
Video game commercials
Branded commercials
and admittedly some did ok but not to the scale we were looking for, so the search continued…
Then last week Hunter, our social wizard, came across some fun accounts documenting hidden locations & exposing unknown parts of the world in real life, immediately his head shifted towards recreating unbelievable - even imaginary - places with our AI toolkit.
Soon he had a list of unbelievable locations that have fascinated humans for years, but that wasn’t quite good enough (although there some amazing accounts crushing with this).
Look, today on social you need engagement just as much as you need good content to drive the algorithm, and what else sparks engagement more than a little controversy?
enter conspiracy theories 😅
So now that the foundation was laid - we just needed to pick one that could create good visuals and “get the people going”
One short Chatgpt brainstorm later and Hunter had landed on the perfect conspiracy for insane visuals and a fire storm of internet engagement, Flat Earth Theory
The Workflow
The workflow for these videos was straight forward but powerful and built for speed, here’s the high level breakdown:
Everything is being done with VEO 3 inside of Google’s Flow video creation tool
Use the frame to video feature, the idea here is that you will be creating your first frame via image generation and then “animating that image” for your videos
To generate your images in flow, click on the “+” and then click on “Generate Image” - this seems to be the fastest image generation and makes it easy to pull the image into your video generation. I’ll go over prompting after the workflow below.
Once you prompt an image you like, press “use this image”
Now your image is being used as the first frame for your video generation. Prompt your video with any voice direction included and you’re good to go.
Prompting
You can check out the prompt used for the images above under this section.
We’ve found its essential to give Chatgpt the structure you’re looking for before you start giving it the specific details of your different scenes.
Say something along the lines: “we are generating veo 3 prompts - for all prompts use the structure of this example, (paste example)”, that will do the initial training for your chat to have consistent prompts
In the structure here - the voice line can be removed for image generation and then added back for the video generation, it’s an easy-fast way for prompts to function both for your image and video.
A frostbitten explorer records himself with an older, low-res camera at night, standing near the sheer vertical edge of an icy landmass. The frozen cliff drops cleanly into deep space — a black void scattered with faint, realistic stars. The explorer wears full Arctic gear: goggles, ski mask, snow-dusted parka. A bright LED headlamp on their forehead lights their breath, fogging in the freezing air. He turns around, showcasing the the shadows of an endless ice terrain with just a tent and fire in the distance. The ice wall glows with a rich, cold blue, cutting sharply against the black sky. The camera shakes slightly in handheld selfie style as the explorer pans slowly toward the edge.Tone is isolated, surreal, and grounded. No diegetic sound. Voice line: “I'm honestly not sure what to think... Tomorrow we'll be doing a ton of research.”
If you’d like a more technical-cinematic prompt structure. Reply to this email with “prompt” and we’ll shoot it over.
It’s important to note your goal with prompting - sometimes leaner and simpler prompting is essential for speed and rapid iterating, once you’ve established a clear vision or storyboard then pulling out enhanced prompting is where your true creative vision can come to life.
Now let’s talk social strategy
To win on the algorithms today you need your hook to have 3 critical elements, we call this the 3-Part hook: Text, audio, and visual
Text: Your text needs to provide context and drive curiosity - remember 70% of people watch social with the sound off
Audio: Opening lines need to support and enhance the curiosity, if the video starts with “hey what’s up” you already lost everyone - get to the good stuff fast and then keep it coming
Visual: Think of the first second of your video like a YouTube thumbnail
Our edge of the world content is a great example of this hook in action, white text functions as our hook text, the voice immediately starts talking - not greeting, and the videos that have outperformed the others start with a visually intriguing opening frame, in this case, the edge of the earth.
The beauty of the algorithms today is that the feedback loop is lightning fast - once you strike “pay dirt” you know its time to double down and add gasoline on the fire.
I now believe, more than ever, that you’ll know if you have a winning idea after 15-20 videos posted over the course of 5-7 days, that is if your aim is to go viral and start a trend like this.
To be clear, I’m not knocking the long game, writing this newsletter is a perfect example of building a brand for the long term - but for something like this if its going to hit - ITS GOING TO HIT - and let’s be honest, it may go away just as fast as it came.
Till next time,
Jeb 🤙
oh yeah, almost forgot , here’s the page
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At BURTX We help brands unlock the power of AI to create content and scale online. If you want to learn more or just jam on AI Video production, you can grab some time here.