2.11 Get inspired: Bringing stories to life with AI video generation

Visualising oral histories

Oral histories are powerful, but their format – often just an audio recording – can be a barrier to engagement in our highly visual digital world, especially on social media platforms.

AI video generation tools are changing this. Platforms like Pictory, RunwayML, and HeyGen can take text descriptions and transform them into short video clips, opening incredible possibilities for bringing spoken stories to life visually.

By converting key scenes from an oral history into a series of video clips, we can create a “visual narrative” that complements the original audio, making the story more engaging and highly shareable.

More advanced models like Google’s Veo and OpenAI’s Sora, which are becoming more accessible in 2025, represent the next frontier. These tools can generate highly realistic, cinematic video clips with synchronized audio and dialogue directly from a text prompt, offering unprecedented potential for historical storytelling and documentary creation.

AI demonstration: Creating a video from a story

Let us return to Ana’s story about the spring festival on the Danube from Module 6. We want to create a short, 30-second video to post online that captures the essence of her memory. The first step is to break the story down into a simple storyboard – a sequence of visual scenes. We can ask an AI to help with this.

Prompt for a text AI (e.g., Google Gemini):

Based on the story of Ana’s spring festival, create a simple, 4-scene storyboard for a short video. Each scene description should be a clear visual instruction for an AI video generator.

Example AI response (storyboard):

• Scene 1: Wide shot. A calm, wide river at sunrise. The light is soft and golden. The mood is peaceful and nostalgic.
• Scene 2: Medium shot. An old, hand-carved wooden boat decorated with wildflowers bobs gently near the riverbank.
• Scene 3: Close-up shot. A young girl’s hands gently place one more wildflower onto the side of the boat.
• Scene 4: Wide shot. The small boat now floats away on the glittering water as villagers watch from the bank, their faces reflecting the morning light.

With this storyboard, we can now use an AI video generator to create each scene. In a tool like Pictory, you would upload your script, and the AI will suggest stock video clips for each sentence, which you can then customize.

For a more creative tool like RunwayML or the more advanced Veo, we would use the scene descriptions as prompts.

Below you can find a video that demonstrates how the storytelling elements can be combined with visual materials to craft an appealing and engaging experience for the learner / user.

The demonstration video above was created using a combination of AI tools. Google Gemini was used to generate a sample story, while OpenAI’s Sora was utilised to create the video clips. The background instrumental music was composed using Suno. A voiceover was generated by Google Gemini through Google AI Studio. Finally, CapCut was used to assemble the video and audio files and to apply basic transition effects.