Turning articles into videos with Shotstack, ChatGPT and Make

Repurposing content is a smart way to get more value from your existing content and reach new audiences with different formats and platforms. Converting blogs, news articles, newsletters, training materials or other long-form text-based content into compelling videos is also a great idea to capture your audience's attention and keep them interested in your content.

As videos are more engaging, dynamic and interactive, they make it easier for viewers to understand and retain information. Plus, they have a higher chance of being shared on social media platforms which helps broaden your reach.

But doing this manually can be a tedious and time-consuming process. In this article, we’ll take you through the steps on how you can take advantage of new technologies and tools such as ChatGPT, Shotstack and Make to automate the conversion of large volumes of text-based content into videos without spending too much time, budget and resources.

Understanding ChatGPT, Shotstack and Make

ChatGPT is a large language model-based chatbot developed by OpenAI that can interact in a conversational way. It can generate, edit, and iterate with users on creative and technical writing tasks, such as composing songs, writing scripts, answering questions or learning a user’s writing style.

Shotstack is a cloud video editing API that enables users to automate the generation of videos at scale. No-code users can use Shotstack’s Studio to create video templates that can be customised with filters, animations and merge fields.

Make is a no-code integration and automation tool that allows users to connect hundreds of tools and services and use built-in features to create workflows and automate business processes.

Turning text to video

By combining ChatGPT, Shotstack and Make, you can turn long-form articles into videos in minutes. Here are the steps:

1. Summarise your articles and generate a voiceover script
   Copy and paste your article into ChatGPT and ask it to summarise using bullet points and generate a voiceover script.

2. Generate voiceover
   Access Shotstack’s Create API to generate a voiceover audio file from your script in your preferred language. Use Shotstack’s native text-to-speech service or choose from third-party providers with text-to-avatar and text-to-speech functionalities.

3. Design your video template
   You can use Shotstack Studio and design your own video template or choose from professionally-designed templates and pre-built templates. You can add effects, filters, and animations to enhance your video. Make sure you use merge fields to insert dynamic data in your video template and customise different elements. In our video template example below, we have merge fields for the blog title, headlines, images and audio.

4. Generate your videos
   Convert multiple articles to videos in minutes from a CSV file or a spreadsheet with the help of third-party no-code tools such as Make and Zapier.

5. Download and distribute your videos
   Download the final video and share it on your preferred channel whether that’s email, your website or social channels.

Generating your videos

Here's how you can create your videos using Google Sheets and Make:

• Create your spreadsheet and populate it with data that matches your merge fields such as blog titles, key points and images or videos

• Create a scenario on Make with the following modules:

Google Sheets Search Rows to select your data source

Shotstack Create from Dynamic Template where you will map your merge fields with data from the Google Sheets

Make Wait module to wait for the render to complete

Shotstack Get Render Status that will return the render status and rendered video URLs

Google Sheets Update A Row to update the original Google Sheet with the final URLs

Final Videos

With ChatGPT, Shotstack and Make, you can turn any long-form article into a video in minutes without any manual editing or scripting. Here’s an example of two videos we created from two of our recent blogs:

Keen to give Shotstack a try? Sign up for your free account today and start generating videos from your blogs on autopilot.