Experimenting with Runway AI

Today, I signed up to try out Runway. I wanted to try the platform after seeing an ad in my Instagram feed, so I made a 60-second short to promote my recent EP, Distant Horizon (available on Spotify and Apple Music). I signed up for the Pro plan to give it a try for the month, and I'm amazed at how well this short came out.

I asked the AI agent to create a 60-second short based on a reference image of Shara Rayne and me in a studio, and I uploaded my song "Distant Horizon." Below are the screenshots from the chat session. It was straightforward. I wanted a 60-second short where I'm playing the piano and Shara is dancing to the beat of the song. I used Robert Miles as the inspiration for the overall theme, since he was my idol growing up in the '90s, and I wanted to pay homage to him with Distant Horizon. I also wanted Shara and me in silhouette so that viewers can focus on her dancing and the music. The dreamy background mirrors the cover art for the EP.

The AI agent analyzed the song, then suggested which part to use for the clip. It ran on Seedance 2.5, and since I was rendering two 30-second clips at 1080p, I set aside a buffer of 4,000 credits just in case. Overall, the quality came out great. As with any AI video, costs add up fast if you're not careful, so I was precise about what I wanted in each scene. Thankfully, I didn't have to regenerate either clip. I also had the AI make the video 9:16 so it's perfect for mobile.

For folks familiar with Seedance, the generated videos always come with default audio, including sound effects, which works well if you're making a cinematic film. Since this is a music video, I had to mute that audio and replace it with my song. The Runway AI agent suggested using the 3:12–4:12 portion of the song, and we went with it. It sliced the audio and attached it to the full 60-second clip. I added some text overlays in CapCut Pro and then uploaded the final product to YouTube.

The final version of the video is below:

I also made a 30-second short for "Let Me Be Held" by Shara Rayne. I used the album cover as a reference along with a 29-second clip of the song, and I had the video match the beat. Below is a screenshot of the initial prompt:

Once the video was generated, the audio clip I had cut earlier played as the underlying track:

Next time, I'll make a longer video to see how the faces hold up and whether they drift. There's still more to explore with Runway, and I look forward to continuing to work with the platform on my next video.