Making My First Explainer Video: How to Make a Cheap AI Movie on Runway

I am making my first ever explainer video. After three projects through the festival circuit, the question I get asked most is not "how did you write it?" or "how did you edit it?" — it is "how much did that cost you?" So that is the video I am making: how to create a cheap AI movie on Runway.

The word cheap gets a bad reputation. People hear it and assume you mean rough, rushed, low effort. That is not what I mean at all. Cheap here means efficient — getting the most usable footage per credit so you can afford to make something with real length instead of a ninety second showreel that stops just as it gets interesting.

That is the whole point. Credits are the budget, and the budget decides your runtime. If every generation costs you three attempts because the prompt was vague, or because you asked the model to do something it was never going to do in one shot, you have paid triple for one clip. Do that across a hundred shots and your feature turns into a trailer.

The video will walk through the workflow I actually use: planning shots before you ever open Runway, writing prompts that land on the first or second attempt, choosing which generations are worth upscaling and which are not, reusing and extending existing clips instead of starting fresh, and knowing when a still image plus motion beats a full video generation.

I will also be honest about the failures. The shots that ate credits and went nowhere, the times I fought the model instead of working with it, and the moments where changing one word in a prompt saved me an entire afternoon. Those mistakes are the expensive part of learning, and there is no reason anyone else should have to pay for them twice.

Cheap does not mean poor quality. It means you spent your budget on the right frames — and had enough left over to keep telling the story.

The explainer video will go up on the YouTube channel once it is finished. If there is something specific you want covered in it, tell me before I lock the edit.