How to make an animated video with AI: a step-by-step guide for beginners

Making an animated video with AI takes about an afternoon and no prior animation experience. The steps are always the same: create an account, choose one visual style, create and lock your characters, type your story as beats to build a storyboard, adjust the keyframes, add dialogue, then render. This guide walks the whole path in Nima, a free-to-start AI animation studio, but the shape of the process transfers to any keyframe-based tool.

Last updated 5 September 2026

Before you start: write your story in beats

Do this in a notes app, not in any tool. Write one plain sentence per moment that changes something. "Mira climbs onto the ledge. She looks down at the city. She jumps." Three beats, three keyframes.

Ten to fifteen beats is roughly a minute of film. If your list is running to pages, you are writing prose rather than a storyboard, and most of it will be ignored by any tool you use.

The walkthrough

1. Create a free account at app.nima.mov. Sign up with Google or an email address and password. The free Beta Insider plan costs nothing and includes three finished films to explore.
2. Open the Tutorial project first. Your new account comes seeded with one. Fifteen minutes inside a working film teaches the interface faster than any amount of reading, this guide included.
3. Start your own project from the dashboard and choose a style: claymation, felted wool, papercraft, pixel art, comic ink, watercolour and others. Pick one and commit. Changing it later means regenerating every keyframe.
4. Create your characters. Describe each one, review the generated reference art, approve it. This is the most important step in the whole process: from here Nima generates every shot against that approved reference, which is what stops your character turning into a stranger by shot four.
5. Type your beats into the storyboard. Each beat becomes a keyframe. Watch the storyboard fill in as you type.
6. Open a keyframe and stage it. Drag characters where you want them, scroll-wheel to resize, shift-click to select several. Swap a stance from the character's pose library. Do not like the drawing? Describe the change and regenerate; the scene keeps its context.
7. Use copy previous for the next keyframe. It duplicates the last one so you only move what actually changed, and show previous ghosts the old position underneath so you can judge the distance.
8. Set your timing in the span between keyframes. Short span, quick movement. Long span, slow one. This is the control that makes motion feel deliberate instead of mechanical.
9. Add dialogue by typing lines onto the keyframes where they are spoken and casting a voice per character. Nima performs each line and animates the mouth to match. Preview and rewrite freely; a changed line does not cost a re-render.
10. Press render. Nima generates every frame between your keyframes and assembles the shots. A short film takes minutes, not hours.
11. Watch it, fix one thing, re-render that shot only. This loop is where the film actually gets good, and it is cheap because you are never re-rendering the parts that already work.
12. Share it. Download the film or share it directly.

The three mistakes beginners make

Rendering too early. A still is free to fix and instant to judge; a render costs time. If you are correcting problems after rendering, you are buying the same shot repeatedly. Argue with the keyframes first.

Over-keying. Adding a keyframe every half second feels diligent and makes things worse: the model loses room to generate natural movement and you now have a dozen stills to keep consistent. Key the moments where intent changes, nothing else.

Describing characters instead of locking them. If you find yourself re-typing "a girl with brown braids and a teal vest" into every shot, stop. Create the character once, approve the reference, and let the tool carry it.

What to make first

Something absurdly small. One character, one location, three beats, fifteen seconds. Finish it end to end and render it. You will learn more from one finished fifteen-second film than from an ambitious three-minute one you abandon in the storyboard.