How to Make AI Story Ads With Claude and Seedance 2.0 (Full Workflow)

Introduction

You commented GLITCH, so here is the whole thing. No gate, no download, no form. Everything you need to build one of those surreal AI character video ads is written out on this page, every prompt included, ready to copy.

You have seen the format. A faceless account posts a glitchy, half-melted AI character acting out a tiny story, and it pulls millions of likes with no creator and no shoot. Then a barefoot-shoe brand runs the same style as a cold paid ad on Meta, and that ad stays live for more than forty days. This guide teaches you to make that, by hand, using Claude to write it and Seedance 2.0 to animate it.

TL;DR

An AI story ad is a short, faceless animated video where one strange AI-generated character carries a product narrative, and it works as both organic content and cold paid creative. You write the beat-by-beat script with Claude, design and lock a character, then animate each beat with Seedance 2.0 as image-to-video clips that restate the character to fight drift. You stitch the clips, add captions and a CTA, and export vertical for Meta. Once your prompts are dialed in, idea to finished ad takes about an hour, and your second one takes far less.

Why does the AI story format work?

Two things are true about this format at once. It spreads organically, and it survives as paid creative. Those are different tests and it passes both.

On the organic side, faceless AI-character accounts rack up large engagement with no face, no creator, and no posting schedule built around a person. The character is the channel. That matters because it means the asset is not tied to a human you have to pay, schedule, or keep happy.

On the paid side, use a simple heuristic. A media buyer kills a losing ad fast, usually inside a week, because every day it runs costs money. So when a cold-traffic ad in this style stays active for forty days or more, that is a strong signal the ad is at least profitable. It is a heuristic, not a guarantee, but a buyer does not keep paying to run an ad that loses money for over a month.

The mechanism is the same in both cases. In a feed full of polished product shots and clean UGC, a surreal character is a pattern interrupt. It does not look like an ad, so the brain does not skip it like one. The strangeness buys the first second of attention, and the story spends that attention on a product angle. You get the scroll-stop of weird content with the intent of a direct-response ad, and you get it without a creator, a set, or a camera.

What do you need to make one?

The stack is short:

• Claude to write the script and the prompts. Use it at claude.ai.
• Seedance 2.0, a text and image-to-video model, to design the character and animate each beat.
• A basic editor to stitch the clips, add captions, and drop a CTA card. Any timeline editor works, including CapCut.
• Your product details: what it is, who buys it, and the one angle this video is about.

That is the whole kit. If wiring up several tools and carrying files between them is not how you want to spend the hour, the same format also exists as a one-step template in HeyOz , where you drop in a product URL and get the animated ad out. The rest of this guide teaches the manual method, because that is what you came for and it is the part worth knowing.

Step 1: Write the script with Claude

Everything downstream depends on the script. A weak script gives you a pretty character doing nothing. Before you prompt anything, understand the anatomy of an AI story script.

The anatomy of an AI story script

• The hook (first 1 to 2 seconds). The character does something strange enough to stop the scroll. No product yet. Pure visual interrupt.
• The escalating premise. The weirdness builds and starts to point at a real customer frustration or desire.
• The turn. The product enters the story as the thing that changes the situation. This is where the angle lands.
• The payoff and CTA. A quick resolution and a clear next step, on screen and in caption.

Keep the whole thing to a 6 to 12 beat micro-story under thirty seconds. Each beat is one shot. You are writing a shot list, not prose.

The Claude script prompt

Paste this into Claude and fill the four brackets at the top. It returns a beat-by-beat shot list where every beat has an on-screen action, the character's emotion, and a one-line caption. That structure is what makes the animation step in a moment possible to control.

What good output looks like

A good shot list reads like something you could hand to an animator with zero questions. Each ACTION is one concrete motion a video model can actually do, like the character slowly turning its head or a single object dropping into frame. The hook beat is genuinely odd, not a product on a table. The turn names your product clearly. The captions sound like real captions, short and punchy, not ad copy.

If the hook is soft, do not rewrite it yourself. Tell Claude in plain language: the hook in beat 1 is too normal, make it stranger and more physically specific, something a scroller has never seen. It will sharpen that beat and leave the rest intact. Lock the script you like before you generate a single frame.

Step 2: Animate with Seedance 2.0

This is the hard step. Be honest with yourself about that going in. Two problems make or break the whole video, and they are both solvable once you know they exist.

• Getting a strong, consistent character design. The character is the only thing holding your story together. If it is generic, the video is generic.
• Holding that character across clips. Video models drift. The character that looked great in beat 1 can come back with a different face, color, or body in beat 4. Fighting that drift is most of the work.

The approach that works: lock the character once as a reference image, then drive every beat as a separate clip that restates the full character description each time. You are not asking the model to remember the character between clips. It cannot. You are reminding it, every single beat.

Lock the character first

Generate a single clean reference image of your character before you animate anything. Seedance handles image-to-video, so a strong locked reference is the anchor every clip inherits from. Use this prompt, expanding the vibe from your Claude brief into concrete physical detail.

Generate until you get a character that is memorable and a little wrong, with a silhouette you could recognize at a glance. Save that image. It is now the reference for every beat. The discipline of locking a character before you animate is the same idea behind the storyboard method guide , which goes deeper on character consistency if you want it.

Animate each beat

Now animate one beat at a time. Feed Seedance your locked character image plus the per-beat prompt below. The prompt pulls the ACTION and EMOTION straight from the matching beat in your Claude shot list, and it restates the character description in full so the model does not redraw it. Do this for every beat, in order.

Troubleshooting

• Character drifts between clips. Paste the full character description into every beat prompt, word for word. Do not shorten it. The repetition is what holds the design.
• Motion is too static. Add one specific small motion to the ACTION line and name a camera move like slow push in. One motion, not three.
• Face or limbs distort. Keep clips short and motion small, and add the instruction do not morph the face or limbs. Long clips with big gestures are where the melting starts.
• Vibe is too clean to feel native. Tell the model surreal and a little rough is good, do not clean it into a polished commercial. The format lives on looking slightly wrong.

Chaining these prompts and holding a character across a dozen clips is a real skill, and it takes a few runs to get smooth. If you would rather not learn it, the HeyOz AI story template handles character consistency and the prompt chain internally, so you get the clips without managing any of it. Either path, you assemble next.

Step 3: Assemble and ship

You now have a folder of short clips, one per beat. The assembly is tool-agnostic. Any editor does it.

1. Stitch the clips in beat order. Beat 1 first, straight through to your CTA beat. The story should read in sequence with no gaps.
2. Add captions. Most of these are watched muted, so the story has to land with the sound off. Put the caption from each beat on screen as it plays.
3. Drop the CTA card. End on a clean frame with the product name and one line telling the viewer what to do.
4. Export vertical. Use 9:16 and keep the total under thirty seconds for Reels, TikTok, Stories, and Shorts.

Pacing decides whether the hook works. Cut on the beat, keep the energy moving, and kill any dead frames in the first second. If a clip has a slow start where the character settles before the action, trim those frames so beat 1 opens on the strange thing immediately. The first second is the whole game.

Once your prompts are dialed in, this entire process runs in about an hour the first time. The second video is faster, because you reuse the script prompt and only change the brief.

How do you test these on Meta?

Treat each ad as one entry in a creative test, not a finished masterpiece. The format's real advantage is that variations are cheap, so you can put the format to work the way you already run UGC testing, the same volume logic behind AI UGC ads at scale .

Generate several variations from the same Claude script prompt by changing one input at a time: a different hook, a different character vibe, a different angle on the product. Ship them together, let the data pick the winner, then scale the winner and iterate new variations off what it taught you.

Because producing ten variations costs you prompts and render time instead of ten shoots, your constraint stops being production and becomes testing throughput. If you want to batch many variations fast without re-prompting each one by hand, the HeyOz template makes that part trivial.

Frequently asked questions

How do you make those AI character videos?

You write a short beat-by-beat script with an AI model like Claude, design a single character as a reference image, then animate each beat as a short clip with a video model like Seedance 2.0. You stitch the clips, add captions, and export vertical. The character is generated, so there is no actor, shoot, or face.

What AI tool animates a character from a script?

Seedance 2.0 is a text and image-to-video model that animates a still character image into short motion clips driven by a prompt. You give it a locked character reference plus a per-beat motion instruction, and it returns a clip. Restating the character description in every prompt is what keeps the design consistent across clips.

Can you use AI story videos as Meta ads?

Yes. The format runs as cold-traffic paid creative, not just organic content. A surreal AI character is a pattern interrupt in feed, which helps it earn attention against polished product ads. Ship it like any other creative test and let the data decide.

How long does it take to make one AI story ad?

About an hour for your first one, once your prompts are working. After that, each new ad is faster because you reuse the same script prompt and only change the product brief. The slow part is dialing in the character and the prompt chain the first time.

Do AI story ads actually convert or just go viral?

They can do both, but they are different jobs. Organic reach proves the format stops the scroll, while a paid ad that stays live for weeks signals it is at least profitable. Conversion still depends on your product, your angle, and your offer, so test these the way you test any creative rather than assuming virality equals sales.

Do I need video editing skills?

No. The editing is stitching clips in order, adding captions, and dropping a CTA card, which any basic timeline editor handles. The craft is in the script and the character consistency, not the edit.

Why does the character have to stay consistent across clips?

Because inconsistency reads as fake. If the character's face, color, or body changes between beats, the viewer senses something is wrong even if they cannot name it, and they scroll. Restating the full character description in every animation prompt is the fix.

You have the workflow

That is the real method, start to finish. Write the beat list with Claude, lock a character, animate each beat with Seedance 2.0 while restating the character every time, stitch, caption, and ship it vertical to Meta. Nothing on this page was withheld. Run it once on a real product and you will own a system you can rerun for any product after.

If you would rather have the output without the learning curve, the same format lives as a ready-made template in HeyOz , one of several AI ad templates there. The manual way teaches you the craft. The template just gets you the ad. Pick whichever fits how you want to spend the hour.