Turn Product Photos Into Scroll-Stopping Video Content

The Rundown In this guide, you will turn a product photo into a cinematic clip ready for social media using Runway’s video generation tool. This method excels at creating consistent clips that are ready for ad campaigns and product announcements. Who This Is Useful For E-commerce brands and product marketers  who have product photos but no budget for video shoots and need video content for social, ads, and product pages Real estate agents  who want to animate listing photos into walkthrough-style teasers they can send to clients or post on Zillow Content creators and personal brands  who need video for TikTok and Reels but only have still images to work with What You Will Build A cinematic video clip from a single product photo with camera movement, depth, and atmosphere that is ready to post on any social platform. You'll also learn how to get an AI to write your motion prompts so you never start from a blank text box. What You Need to Get Started A  Runway  account - Free is fine. Standard is $15/month Step 1 Start with any product photo you already have. This guide is intended to use shots of physical products, but you can get creative and use headshots, food photography, interior photos, event venues or anything else with a clear subject. Pro tip: Runway uses the photo you upload as the first frame of the video. So pick something that works with zooms, pans and animated light effects. We started with a coffee grounds product photo like this because the light beams and steam from the mug can be animated. Step 2 Instead of trying to come up with a prompt for yourself, use an AI assistant to give you some concepts. We found that Claude understood what Runway excels at and wrote the best prompts. Drop your product photo into Claude and say: Write me a brief video prompt to use in  Runwayml.com  to generate a social media video based on this product photo. Add animations and/or camera movement if applicable. Step 3 Next, go to  runwayml.com  > Tool > Video and add your starting frame + prompt. Pro tip: Set the time to 5 seconds and use Gen-4 Turbo to save tokens. Hit generate. Runway will create a short video clip in about 15–30 seconds. Play it back and compare it to the original still photo. Here's what you'll notice: these don't look obviously AI-generated. Compared to other video generation platforms where outputs can look goofy or melted, Runway keeps it subtle and realistic. The panning, zooming, and dolly moves look clean. That's what makes this actually usable for real content. Pro tip: Try experimenting with different product photos rather than several prompts on the same photo. We found that some photos just worked better than others. Step 4 Once you have your clip, drop it straight into your content. Post the video as an Instagram Reel or TikTok. Use it on your product page or in an email campaign. Use it as the opening shot of a longer video. If you want to polish it, bring it into CapCut or any video editor. Layer on text overlays, music, or a voiceover. Pair it with a custom jingle from Suno and you've got a fully produced video ad without a production team. Going Further Batch with Claude Cowork.  Once you're comfortable with the one-photo flow, scale it up. Drop 10–20 product photos into Claude Cowork, have it identify each product and write Runway prompts for all of them at once. Then run them through Runway in one session. One afternoon of work gives you a full library of video content ready to post.

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