How we made 600 branded videos with AI.

It's a week since our GrokBot issue and in case you're wondering, neither of us are still using it. There are just too many great tools out there that marginal gains don't quite outweigh the effort it takes to change your established working processes.

Claude Code is still the top choice for many people because of its sheer flexibility, and in this issue we're highlighting another use case we love: creating and editing branded videos.

Making one polished social video usually means hours in an editor, and making fifty variations of it means fifty times the hours. For this year's conference we generated around 600 branded videos without opening a video editor at all, using Claude Code and an open-source tool called Remotion. In this deep dive we'll explain how the workflow works, what it did for us, and how to try it yourself this week.

How it actually works

Remotion turns web components into video. You describe the video you want in plain English, Claude Code writes the code, and Remotion plays that code through time and records the result as an MP4.

Think of each video as a tiny web page with a timeline. Because it's built from a template, you can render it a hundred times with different names, photos or colours and get the same polished result every time.

That repeatability is what separates this from AI video models like Google Veo. Those imagine new footage from a prompt, which is impressive but unpredictable, while Remotion renders exactly what the template says, making it ideal for ads, social posts and title cards that need to stay on brand.

Start with a brand folder

Before generating anything, put your brand into one folder Claude can read. That means logos, photographs, fonts, music, and a short text file describing your colours and style.

The rule we followed for the conference was to give Claude access to everything a human designer would have access to. Name the files clearly so the AI can find things without asking, and the same folder will later power your web pages and email templates too.

Your first video

Remotion publishes official instructions for wiring itself into Claude Code at remotion.dev/docs/ai/plugins, and you can simply give Claude that link and ask it to handle the setup. From there, a plain-English prompt is enough to get a first render.

James's starter prompt was along these lines, "generate a video using Remotion to promote this blog post, optimised for Instagram in 1:1 format, use the brand assets in my folder, add interesting animation to catch the viewer's attention, then open Remotion Studio and show me the result".

Remotion Studio opens a live preview inside Claude Code, and you give feedback in chat while the video updates in front of you. James describes talking to it with voice dictation, since spoken feedback carries more detail than typed notes, and says the whole thing feels like directing a film.

What it did at the conference

• Around 600 personalised videos rendered in two formats each, with zero editing time.
• Every attendee could generate their own branded "I'm attending" video from their portal, rendered on demand.
• Speaker announcement videos were generated in bulk by pulling names and photos straight from Supabase, our database.
• The same pipeline produced the intros, outros and lower thirds (the little name graphics in the corner of the screen) on every talk recording.

Last year a handful of videos were edited by hand. A library of 600 personalised videos was never an option for a two-person team using a normal editor, so this opened a door rather than just saving time.

Tips from builders doing this well

• Generate a few scenes at a time rather than a whole video in one prompt, which keeps the style consistent.
• Drag screenshots of designs you like into Claude and ask it to match the layout.
• Ask for a static frame first, then animate it once the layout looks right.
• For precise timing, ask Claude to use GSAP, an animation library that lands elements on exact frames. Framer Motion is physics-based and can drift when rendered.
• If you want to drop the clips into a normal editor, export them with a transparent background in Apple's ProRes 4444 format.

The reality check

This workflow makes templated motion graphics, so if you need filmed footage or cinematic AI clips it solves a different problem. It also needs Node.js installed and a little comfort with developer-flavoured tools, and Windows users should install Git Bash first to keep Claude Code stable.

The default motion the AI produces can feel floaty, and you'll spend some time nudging timing and easing before things look professional. Rendering hundreds of videos also takes real computing power, which is why our conference pipeline rendered in the cloud rather than on our laptops.

How to start

Start with one small, real video, something like a ten-second square promo for a post you were going to share anyway. Once that template exists, every future version costs a sentence of feedback rather than an afternoon of editing.

James has written up the full workflow on his blog, including the prompts he used.