How to turn a script into a video with AI

A script goes to video with AI faster than any other kind of text, because a screenplay is already structured the way production works: scene headings become locations, action lines become keyframes, dialogue becomes performed and lip-synced audio. The translation is nearly mechanical. The craft is in what you cut, camera directions and parentheticals mostly, and in producing scene by scene instead of feeding the whole script in and hoping.

Last updated 5 September 2026

Watch a scene populate from its text

A scene being generated from typed description: the beats go in, the storyboard fills with keyframes, the scene exists:

The mapping, line by line

INT. KITCHEN, MORNING is a location plus a time of day. It becomes a generated, reusable place, and every later scene under the same heading must reuse it, not re-invent it.

Action lines are beats, and good screenwriting habits pay off directly: present tense, concrete, one visible thing at a time. Each beat that changes the picture becomes a keyframe.

Character names map to your locked cast. The first appearance is a design decision; every one after is a reference.

Dialogue transfers almost untouched into performed voice and mouth flaps. It is the highest-fidelity channel in the whole mapping.

What gets cut: camera directions, parentheticals, and any action line describing feelings rather than pictures. "She realises the truth" is a novel wearing a screenplay's clothes; give it a picture or lose it.

Doing it in Nima

Nima compiles a scene description into a populated storyboard, which is the mechanical half of the mapping above, then hands you keyframes to direct. Scene headings become reusable locations, your cast is locked once and referenced everywhere, and each shot renders and splices independently, which is what makes a script-length project survivable.

1. Create a free account at app.nima.mov.
2. Cast your script: create each named character once and approve the reference art.
3. Build your locations from the scene headings, one per heading, and reuse them.
4. Feed one scene's action lines in as beats and let Nima populate the storyboard.
5. Direct the keyframes: staging, poses, timing.
6. Add the dialogue, which transfers from a screenplay almost untouched.
7. Render that scene, then repeat. Scenes are independent, so this parallelises.

Produce it like a production, not like a prompt

Shoot out of order, cheapest first. Pick the script's simplest scene, two characters and one location, and take it all the way to rendered film before touching the rest. That scene settles your cast, your style and your pacing, and every scene after inherits the decisions.

Then scenes are independent jobs, exactly as a real production schedules them, and a fix to scene six never re-renders scene two. The long-form guide covers the assembly end of this; the short version is that per-shot re-rendering is what makes script-length work economically possible.