How to Make Story TikToks and YouTube Shorts With AI Video

Story Shorts and story TikToks win on retention, not on production value. The viewer decides in the first second whether this is a story they want to finish. That means a readable hook, captions, and a visual that doesn't break the spell by swapping the protagonist's face every cut. AI makes the volume possible. Consistency is what keeps the volume from looking like spam.

In Paintbrush, create a vertical project, paste your story into the creation agent, and review the scene list it plans. It reuses the protagonist and settings already in the project, and you approve the previews and a credit estimate before any video is generated.

Start in 9:16 and stay there

Create the project at 9:16. Do not generate 16:9 and crop later — you'll lose heads, hands, and the part of the frame captions need. Vertical composition wants medium and close shots. Wide establishing frames waste the small screen. Write prompts as if the character fills the middle third of a phone.

The 30–45 second story shape

Most surviving story shorts are 30 to 45 seconds, six to ten clips:

• 0–1s hook — a line that states the conflict. "My sister brought her kids to my child-free wedding." Show the face, not the venue.
• Setup — who, where, why this matters. One clip.
• Escalation — two or three cuts. Each cut is a new beat, not a longer take.
• Turn — the message, the revenge, the confession.
• Button — one line that invites a comment or a part two.

If your source is a Reddit post or a short story, the creation agent will often plan more scenes than a short needs. Ask it to cut anything that isn't a beat before you approve. Shorts die from extra setup, not from missing scenery.

A tiny recurring cast beats a new universe every day

Build a narrator or protagonist once, plus two or three reusable interiors (apartment, office, restaurant). Faceless channels that grow are the ones where the visual world is familiar. You're not hiding that it's AI — you're making it look like a show. See the longer faceless channel playbook if you're also posting long-form.

Write for captions, generate for faces

Most people watch muted. Put the hook in on-screen text in the editor, and keep spoken lines short enough to read. The visual should be a face, a gesture, or a clear location change — not a paragraph of action. If the model has to choose between likeness and a complicated stunt, likeness should win on a phone screen. The viewer is reading.

Assign the narrator a voice anyway. A growing slice of viewers leave sound on, and a consistent voice is another identity hook. Match clip length to the line so you're not fading out mid-sentence.

Production cadence

Batch. One sitting: pick five stories, paste each into the agent and trim its plan to a beat list, generate. Another sitting: captions, hook text, music bed, publish. Don't context-switch from prompt to TikTok for every post. The channels that post daily are the ones that separated planning from rendering.

Use Standard quality for daily shorts. Save Pro for a compilation, an ad, or the episode you're putting on a landing page. Fast and consistent beats slow and perfect when the algorithm wants frequency.

Retention details that matter more than the model

• Hard cut on the hook — no fade-in, no logo bumper
• Captions in a large, high-contrast font, not the burned-in AI text
• Music quieter than speech; mute the music under the last line
• End on a face or a question, not an empty room
• If part two exists, say so in the last second, not the first

The takeaway

Vertical story video is a writing and consistency problem dressed up as a generation problem. Lock 9:16, lock a small cast, cut the source down to beats, and generate short clips that survive a mute watch. The model will give you pictures. The shot list and the captions are what make people stay.

For a worked story format you can adapt to vertical video, follow the Reddit story animation guide.