How to Make a Professional Explainer Video for Under $1

No Premiere. No After Effects. No Fiverr. No stock footage subscription. Just a few AI tools, a clear idea, and about 45 minutes.

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Here's something that should cost $500 and take a week. We're going to do it for less than a dollar.

A proper explainer video. Narrated. Animated. Music-synced. Ready to upload to YouTube, Instagram, or LinkedIn.

The total cost: whatever a few thousand tokens costs you on Claude, plus about $0.10 in TTS audio generation. That's it.

We're going to use:

• Claude — to write the script and generate the animation
• ElevenLabs (or any TTS tool) — to generate the voiceover
• Replicate (incredibly-fast-whisper) — to get timestamps from the audio
• Claude Design — to build the actual animation
• Claude Video Export — to combine the animation and audio into a finished MP4

Let's go.

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Step 1: Pick an idea that's actually visual

The biggest mistake people make with explainer videos is picking a topic that's hard to animate. "How to improve your team's communication" is abstract. "How a planetary slingshot works" is concrete — there are objects, motion, cause and effect.

Good explainer topics have:

• Something that moves or changes
• A clear before and after
• A process you can show step by step

We're going to use the planetary slingshot as our example throughout this post. It's the technique NASA uses to accelerate spacecraft by stealing a tiny bit of a planet's orbital momentum. Visually rich. Scientifically interesting. Completely explainable in 60 seconds.

Pick your own topic. Same process applies.

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Step 2: Write the script with Claude

Open Claude. Use this prompt:

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Prompt:

Write a 60-second explainer video script about how a planetary gravitational slingshot works.

Requirements:
- Conversational, not academic. Write like you're explaining it to a smart friend.
- Concrete and visual. Every sentence should describe something we can see or animate.
- Short sentences. No sentence longer than 15 words.
- No jargon without immediate explanation.
- End with one punchy line that lands.
- Target: around 140 words (60 seconds at a natural TTS pace).

Structure it as plain prose, no scene headings, no [VISUAL:] tags. Just the words the narrator will speak.

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Claude will give you something like this:

A spacecraft is heading toward Jupiter. It's not planning to stop.

As it gets close, Jupiter's gravity grabs it — like a ball on a string. The spacecraft swings around the planet in a tight arc.

But here's the trick. Jupiter is moving too. Orbiting the sun at 13 kilometers per second. As the spacecraft swings around the back of the planet, it borrows some of that momentum.

The spacecraft exits the encounter going faster than it arrived. Sometimes much faster. Voyager 2 used four slingshots. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. It's now the most distant human-made object in existence.

No fuel burned. No engine fired. Just gravity, geometry, and timing.

We've been slinging things across the solar system since 1973. And we're just getting started.

Read it out loud. Time it. If it's over 70 seconds, trim it. Under 50 seconds, add a beat. You want 55–65 seconds.

Once you're happy with the script, copy it. You'll use it in the next step.

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Step 3: Generate the voiceover with ElevenLabs

Go to elevenlabs.io. Free tier works fine for this.

1. Click Text to Speech
2. Paste your script
3. Pick a voice. For science content, a calm, assured male or female voice works well. Try "Adam", "Rachel", or "Domi" — all available on the free tier.
4. Set the speed to 0.95 (very slightly slower than default — gives the animation more breathing room)
5. Click Generate
6. Download the MP3

You've just recorded a professional voiceover for approximately $0.00 on the free tier, or a few cents if you're on a paid plan.

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Step 4: Get timestamps with incredibly-fast-whisper on Replicate

This is the step that connects your audio to your animation. You need to know when each line of narration is spoken, so you can tell Claude Design how long each scene should run.

Go to replicate.com/vaibhavs10/incredibly-fast-whisper.

You don't need to write any code. Replicate has a web interface.

1. Click Input
2. Upload your MP3
3. Set timestamp_granularities to chunk (the default)
4. Set language to en
5. Click Run

It takes about 10–15 seconds. The output is a JSON object that looks like this:

{
  "text": "A spacecraft is heading toward Jupiter. It's not planning to stop...",
  "chunks": [
    {
      "text": " A spacecraft is heading toward Jupiter.",
      "timestamp": [0, 2.4]
    },
    {
      "text": " It's not planning to stop.",
      "timestamp": [2.4, 4.1]
    },
    {
      "text": " As it gets close, Jupiter's gravity grabs it.",
      "timestamp": [4.5, 7.2]
    }
  ]
}

Each chunk has a start and end timestamp in seconds. Copy the entire JSON output.

A note on chunk quality: Whisper sometimes produces awkward splits — a sentence cut in half, or two beats jammed into one chunk. That's fine. In the next step, Claude will re-group them by narrative logic, not by Whisper's boundaries. The timestamps are what matter, not the exact chunk splits.

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Step 5: Generate the scene brief with Claude

Now you're going to take the raw timestamp JSON and turn it into a structured scene brief — a document that tells Claude Design exactly what to animate and for how long.

Open a new Claude conversation. Use this prompt:

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Prompt:

I have a 60-second explainer video about planetary gravitational slingshots. Below is the transcript with timestamps from a Whisper transcription of the voiceover audio.

Your job: group these chunks into 5–7 scenes. Each scene should be a coherent narrative beat — not a Whisper chunk boundary.

For each scene, output:
- Scene number
- Start time → End time (in seconds)
- Narration text for that scene
- Animation description: what should be visually happening on screen during this scene. Be specific about motion, objects, and transitions. Think in terms of what a motion graphics designer would actually animate.

Keep the animation descriptions concrete and achievable. This will be rendered as a React animation in a browser, so no photorealistic 3D — clean 2D motion graphics, paths, shapes, labels, and smooth transitions.

Give the output as an MD file which can be used by Claude design or Remotion skill

Here is the transcript JSON:

[PASTE YOUR JSON HERE]

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Claude will output something like this:

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Scene 1 — 0s to 4.1s Narration: "A spacecraft is heading toward Jupiter. It's not planning to stop." Animation: Deep black space background with stars. A small silver spacecraft enters from the left, moving steadily right. Jupiter appears on the right side of the frame, large and banded. The spacecraft's trajectory is shown as a dotted white line heading directly toward the planet.

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Scene 2 — 4.5s to 9.8s Narration: "As it gets close, Jupiter's gravity grabs it — like a ball on a string." Animation: The dotted trajectory line curves as the spacecraft approaches Jupiter. Gravity field lines radiate outward from the planet. The spacecraft begins to arc around the planet's edge, following the curved path. A subtle "pull" animation shows the spacecraft accelerating into the curve.

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Scene 3 — 10.2s to 18.5s Narration: "But here's the trick. Jupiter is moving too. Orbiting the sun at 13 kilometers per second. As the spacecraft swings around the back of the planet, it borrows some of that momentum." Animation: The sun enters from the far left. An orbital path arc shows Jupiter moving in its orbit direction (left to right, behind the spacecraft's exit point). As the spacecraft completes its arc around Jupiter's back side, a momentum transfer animation shows — a brief energy "pulse" passing from the planet to the spacecraft. An arrow appears showing the spacecraft's exit velocity, visibly larger than the entry arrow.

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(and so on for scenes 4–7)

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This is your production brief. It tells Claude Design exactly what to build, scene by scene, with timing baked in.

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Step 6: Build the animation in Claude Design

Now open Claude.ai/design and start a new conversation. You're going to give Claude Design the full scene brief and ask it to build the animation as a React component.

Use this prompt:

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Prompt:

Build an animated explainer video as a React component. The video is about how a planetary gravitational slingshot works.

The animation should be exactly 62 seconds long and play automatically on load, no user controls needed. Use a requestAnimationFrame loop with a deterministic time variable so the animation is frame-accurate.

Visual style:
- Dark space background (#0a0a1a)
- Clean 2D motion graphics, not photorealistic
- Bright accent colors: spacecraft in white/silver, Jupiter in warm orange/brown bands, trajectory paths in cyan, momentum/energy effects in yellow
- Clean sans-serif labels where needed (Helvetica or system-ui)
- Smooth easing on all transitions (ease-in-out)
- Canvas size: 1080x1920 (vertical, Instagram-ready)

Here are the scenes. Animate each one for the duration specified:

SCENE 1 (0s – 4.1s)
[paste scene 1 description]

SCENE 2 (4.5s – 9.8s)
[paste scene 2 description]

SCENE 3 (10.2s – 18.5s)
[paste scene 3 description]

[continue for all scenes]

At the end of the last scene, hold the final frame for 2 seconds then fade to black.

Important technical requirements:
- Use a single useEffect with a requestAnimationFrame loop
- Track elapsed time in a ref, not state
- All drawing on a <canvas> element
- No external dependencies beyond React

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Claude Design will generate the React component. It might not be perfect on the first try. Common things to ask it to fix:

• "The spacecraft is moving too fast in scene 2, slow it down"
• "Add the sun in scene 3, it's currently missing"
• "The momentum pulse in scene 3 isn't visible enough, make it more dramatic"
• "The text labels are too small"

Iterate until it looks right. Usually takes 2–3 rounds of feedback.

Tip: Once you are mostly happy with the animation, give Claude Design the timestamps json file again to have it align. This usually aligns the animations to voiceover really well.

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Step 7: Download the ZIP from Claude Design

When you're happy with the animation, you need to get it out of Claude and onto your machine.

In Claude Design, click the Download button on the artifact. Claude exports a ZIP file containing all the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript needed to run your animation in a browser — self-contained, no dependencies, no internet required to render.

You'll get a file called something like claude-export.zip. That's your animation package. Keep it — it goes straight into Claude Video Export in the next step.

Don't try to share the Claude artifact URL for export purposes. Claude URLs can stop resolving or require authentication, which breaks the export pipeline. The ZIP is the reliable path.

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Step 8: Export to MP4 with Claude Video Export

Go to claudevideoexport.com.

You'll see two inputs:

1. Upload your ZIP — the file you just downloaded from Claude Design
2. Upload your MP3 — the voiceover you generated in Step 3

Both features are built into Claude Video Export. Simply upload both files, hit Export, and the tool handles the rest — extracting your animation, loading it in a real browser, capturing it frame-by-frame using actual browser rendering (not a screen recorder), mixing in your MP3 audio track, and encoding everything as a single MP4 with audio perfectly synced to the animation from frame one.

When it's done — usually a couple of minutes for a 60-second animation — you get one file. Download it.

That's your finished video. Narrated, animated, synced, ready to post.

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What this actually cost

Step	Tool	Cost
Script	Claude	~$0.01 in API tokens, or free on Claude.ai
Voiceover	ElevenLabs	Free tier / ~$0.10 paid
Timestamps	Replicate (incredibly-fast-whisper)	~$0.004 per run
Scene brief	Claude	~$0.02 in API tokens, or free on Claude.ai
Animation	Claude Design	Included in Claude subscription
MP4 + audio export	Claude Video Export	Free

Total: under $0.15 if you're on paid plans. Free if you're on free tiers.

A Fiverr explainer video runs $150–500. A motion design agency starts at $2,000. You just did it for a dime.

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What to do with the video

Upload the final MP4 directly to:

• YouTube — works perfectly, 1080x1920 displays as a Short
• Instagram Reels — native format
• LinkedIn — great for thought leadership content
• X / Twitter — uploads fine
• Notion, Slack, Google Slides — just drag and drop

No re-encoding, no format conversion. It comes out of Claude Video Export in a format every platform accepts.

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The broader point

Every step in this workflow existed separately before. Whisper has been around since 2022. ElevenLabs has been doing great TTS for years. Claude has been writing good scripts for a while.

What's new is that Claude Design can now generate animations good enough to be worth exporting. And Claude Video Export closes the last gap — getting that animation out of the browser, combined with your audio, into a file you can actually use.

The $1 explainer video isn't a hack or a workaround. It's just what the tools are capable of now. The only reason it cost $500 before was friction — needing a designer, a voiceover artist, a video editor, and a project manager to coordinate all of it.

That friction is gone.

Use the 45 minutes you saved to make the next video.

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Claude Video Export is free at claudevideoexport.com.