How to Make a Training Video (Using AI!)

Hey there, it's Kevin from Synthesia, and today I'm going to show you how I build  a training video from start to finish. I'll keep my camera rolling the whole way as  I try to build this video here, and you'll be able to see each click, each decision that I  make—all the way from copying and pasting my script into my script-box to downloading  the final video after we click generate. I'm a little bit nervous because I  haven't put this all together in one go, so I'm not sure how it's gonna  go,

but let's get to it... Alright, so what am I starting with? Before we even get into the studio and  start editing, I also have to start off with a script. And so our video here is  about how to give and receive feedback. It's going to be a course intro, but I  always start with a really good script, and as you can see here, I've taken  my script that's in the middle here, and I break it up into two  to three sentence chunks. The reason for that is I want  to keep the pacing fast. I want what's

on screen to be changing  around every 10 to 20 seconds, just to keep my viewers' interest  as they're going through this video. You'll see I have on my other tab  here I've got Synthesia Studio. I'll just show you how I build this  is the video editor that I use, but you should be able to follow along with this  process and also build your video pretty easily. So first things first, I click on new video, and I'm going to use a template  because I am not a visual designer, so I'm choosing this t

emplate. The first step  here is that I want to even before I start to begin to put my script into the script box is I'm  going to start putting in the different layouts. So first, I want to start off with the title  screen to introduce what my video and my course is going to be about. So I'll start with that  title layout here. The next layout I'm going to add is I want to get my learners excited about  this course and what they could hope to achieve. So I'm going to add this layout here using 

stock footage, then we're going to cut back to my narrators to say, "Hey, I'm going to be  your course guide—this is the person you should look for in different parts of the experience  to follow along and for when things pop up." Next, I'm going to tell them what the course is about... so I'm going to find  this nice layout that shows, okay, this is the four different things that are going  to be in the course, the four different lessons. So I want something that's  like a table of contents, a

nd then finally, I'm going to  cut back to my presenter to say, "Hey, I'll be your guide. I'll be here for  certain learning activities along the way..." But let's get started, so they're going to  be sort of this voice to engage my viewer. So we've already done that first step, next  is that we're going to choose who we want to be our presenter, and so in this case,  right now, we have our friend Emery here... I'm just going to replace him with somebody who  is maybe going to be a better fit fo

r my audience. Maybe they want to see someone in a suit, so I  have my friend Leah here who I think is going to be a good replacement for Emery... So now we  have our Avatar that's going to be our speaker on all the different screens, ready to go. Next, I'm  going to, let's say, I want to change the colors, maybe to match her suit, so I'm just going to  make some small changes here, like matching the color of her dress suit to the template  so that she kind of pops a little bit more. I like that

background, and you can see it's  changed these greens to navies. Alright, so here we are at our next step, where we're going to  copy and paste our script directly into the script box. So this is going to serve as our voiceover  when putting together our video, and we already divided the script into two to three sentence  chunks to keep things moving, so I'm just going to erase the script that we have here, and I'm going  to copy and paste my script in each scene, and I don't want you to have

to stick around for that,  so I'm going to speed things up just a little bit. Okay, so at this point, you can see for each  scene we have the script in the script box. Now we don't really need to take over care of  a voiceover because we're using an AI tool, so this is where we will start to change what's on  screen. We have to think about what we're using to visualize each part. So whenever I, as a rule of  thumb, typically with an avatar, I almost start, at least the intro, um, with an avatar.

So I  like to have a talking head right up front, and I like to have them at the end just  as a way to wrap things up and say, "Hey, this video is coming to a close." We have  other ways that we can visualize some of our script. I've already made these decisions  along the way where maybe something like this, where instead of having my narrator just talking  the whole time, I want to change things up and go with stock footage. In this case, I went with a  video of some folks high-fiving, so you

can see that looks something like this. And sometimes  we just need text on screen to, you know, give us titles or to talk about important things that  we really want to highlight from the message. So what I'm going to do at this point is I'm going  to make the changes to the text on screen, swap out what's on the template for, you know, the  titles and the things that we want people to read. Foreign. Okay, so at this stage, we can already see that  some of the scenes are already finished. So,

for example, scene one, it looks like I have  my title and all my text on screen. I change the text on the screen here. Okay, so for this  scene, you can see that I'm missing a Chiron that introduces my avatar, and I know that sometimes  for Talking Heads, you want to have a Chiron or some sort of description that pops up in the  bottom like it does here to introduce kind of who you're speaking to. So I'm going to show you  how I create that. First, I start out by using a shape. I'm just going t

o drop that into the  lower third, drag that down and stretch it out, but it shouldn't pop out too far, and I'm going  to use this opportunity to color match it with the template. It's okay if it's hanging off  the side; that's just going to make sure that it's only going to animate or show you what's  in frame, so I'm not too concerned about that. Then I'm going to take some text that's from  another part of our template, and I'll drop that in right there and unlock those so I can move them  ar

ound, and now I just write in my title and the name and the title of this person. In this case,  we're going to call our Avatar Isabella Garcia in this video, and we're going to say she's our  learning expert and course guide. Now, if I were to play this, you would see that nothing would  happen because I've just placed these objects. I haven't told them how to animate or what to  do. So, in order to get these things moving, we have what's called animation markers, which you  can find here. What

you do is you essentially just put a marker down, like I do here in the script,  where you want something to start animating, and the beauty of this is you no longer have to sit  with your stopwatch and guess and check, did the animations line up with when they were mentioned  in the script or did the text pop up when it's mentioned in the audio? Well, now you can just  dropping that marker, and we're going to tie each object to a marker. So first things first, I'm  going to animate this Chiron

to come in, slide in from the left, right at the same start, but then  I want Isabella Garcia to fade in right when it's mentioned. So what I'm going to do is I'm going  to select an animation, set the delay to zero, and put an animation marker at and tie that to flag  number one. And what that says is when you get to flag one, look at that object and start to fade  it in right away. The same here with the title. It's mentioned a little bit later in the script.  I'm going to have it fade in, ma

ke sure the delay is set to zero, and set it to come in on the  second flag. So this is what it looks like now, "Hi, I'm Isabella, your learning expert  and your guide for the next few lessons." Excellent, so you can see that it comes up right  when it's mentioned in the script. Now I have the same thing to do with these objects here  where at each part of the script that I want these to fade in, I'm going to go in here,  drop it into animation marker for each one. Alright, that's it! Now I have

all of my parts. I think I have the script on each page. I've  got my the things that are that need to be animated are now animated, and now all that's  left for us to do is to title this video, so now I get to hit the, uh, let's add a little bit  of music. I'm sorry I'd love to add music just, you know, at the beginning of something  to kind of get the emotion going, get a little bit of engagement going, so  looking through here, let's add this music, and now I hit generate video. Here you can

see  that I can choose to add my captions or not, um, I typically like to have my captions burned  in so I don't have to worry about the video being more accessible to folks, um, but I can also  take those off and download the SRT file later. I'm going to click generate video,  and I'll see you in a little bit. So this is the last stage of building a training  video. When we finish our video, we're not quite yet done because we have to think about how we're  going to get it in front of viewers.

So if you're in a learning context, the way that I'm going  to do that here is that, you know, I can play my video here and kind of see, did my production  turn out okay, or I could do something else. I can click on these three dots here and I can download  my videos as MP4, which could be good if I want to upload it into another platform. I can also use  this opportunity to download the subtitles if I didn't have them burned into my video. This will  download an SRT file that's based directly

off the script, so you know it's going to be perfect in  just what you need. The other way is when I hit publish here, we're going to click Public Access,  and I have this option to copy the embed code, and if you're familiar with this, this is just  the HTML your iframe code that's going to say, "Hey, here's a video that's hosted somewhere,  play it in your content management system." So if you copy that embed code, you should be able  to just drop that right into your LMS or CMS, and your vide

o will appear there with  a video player every single time. If you are looking to share the video with other  folks, you could do that as well, but for now, let's just stick to the MP4 and embedding the  HTML code into our content management system. That's all for today. Thank you so much for tuning  in. I'm relieved that that's over. We got that video all together. I can't thank you enough  for sticking around through this whole video. Don't forget to hit like and subscribe to follow  along for

more Synthesia Academy content or advice on how to build training videos with AI avatars.  That's all for now. We'll see you down the road.