Introduction
How I Made a 3D AI-Animated Explainer Video in 3.5 Hours (Using ChatGPT-4o and Hedra Character-3!)
AI animation is advancing at lightning speed — by the time I publish this, there might be a million new tools. But right at this moment my mind is blown because I created an entire 3D animated ad, complete with characters, a script, and product branding, in just a few hours!
I used ChatGPT-4o to generate the concept, characters, and script, and Hedra Character-3 for the animation. A full AI animation 3D explainer video — in just 3.5 hours! Watch the video above, then let’s break down how me and my little AI friends made it happen.
Did you watch the video? Okay good, let’s get started!
Pre-Production for AI Animation
So to start, I prompted ChatGPT with exactly what I wanted to do. To be honest, writing this blog post was actually the end goal so even that’s a part of the prompt (although I’m actually writing this blog post myself… mostly… I swear… this article is actually taking way longer to write than making the video)
And I got a script.
Pro tip, I prompted it to format the script with Voiceover on left and Visuals on right.
All of this with one prompt! (okay two if you count the script formatting prompt)
After that, I got some early character designs.
I got some UX designs for the CanGuru app.
This guy looks great, and I love the cans around his shoulder, but the cans don’t end up in the final video and you’ll see why later.
Next I asked my friend ChatGPT for a few shots of Rex showing us the app on his phone.
And I asked for a closing image.
Okay, this is looking good even though The Outback looks just like Arizona. Had to do an image search to make sure the AI didn’t hallucinate. It’s good. This is The Outback. Let’s animate this guy and see how he looks.
I don’t like it. Try again.
No
This is excellent! Just the right amount of silly without being over the top. Let’s pop it in Hedra and this time, we don’t need any audio. I just used Kling 1.6 12v to generate an animation.
Hi, how are you. Whats your name?
Do you mind typing with your feet?
Where did the cute asian girl go tho?
Oh well, this looks like it might work. I used Kling 1.6 I2V for the AI Animation and got the following result.
Then I tried to make some funny Can Fan / Can Gurus, but I didn’t like them much.
Then I told ChaG to make the cans levitate around him and it worked out pretty well. The AI animation came out pretty well too except the logos on the cans got messed up. If this was a video for a client, we would just animate those cans separately and clean up the shot but alas CanGuru is not a real product or client so I kept it as is. It shows you the limitations as of writing this post on April 26, 2025.
Okay, finally I made some scenes for the Can-ival and the Can Swap Meet
Post Production
Okay so finally we put everything together in an edit suite. I used CapCut for this because I like the transitions and some of the coloring tools. It’s just really good. I wish they paid me to say that but they don’t.
I asked Alex from the motion graphics team at TADApix to put together some of the UX animations for the CanGuru app. He spend about 2 hours on it mainly because his computer kept crashing.
So if you’re really trying to add up the hours, it’s about 1.5 hours for the MGFX and 3.5 for the AI stuff and editing. So total of 5 hours total. Of course this is a parody product and an experiment. If there was a real client we would spend a lot more time cleaning up anything sloppy and of course there would be rounds and rounds of revisions. So in the real world, this would take a lot of time.
Well that’s about it. This article took me from 8 am to about 1:30 pm to complete, so I can confidently say that writing this article took longer than making that video.
Thanks for reading!
This same process can be used to make very exciting explainer videos. Check out some of our AI generated explainer videos on the animated explainer videos page.
One Response
Good job me