How to Make a Cinematic AI Commercial With Kling 3.0

The finished Nike commercial runs under a minute. It has a cinematic rocket launch, an astronaut descending a ramp on Mars, a voiceover that sounds like it cost money, and a score that lands on the first try. I made the whole thing with AI in a single session. No crew, no studio, no budget.

Here's exactly how.

The Workflow That Actually Holds Up#

Most people jump straight to prompting an image generator and wonder why the output feels random. The reason is they skipped the first half of the process. The sequence matters:

1. Brand research and audience analysis
2. Concept development and script
3. Shot-by-shot image prompts and video prompts
4. Image generation
5. Image-to-video animation
6. Voiceover and music
7. Edit

Skipping step two means your images have no throughline. Skipping step three means your video prompts are vague and your results are inconsistent. The workflow isn't busywork, each step feeds the next one.

For the Nike commercial, I started with a custom GPT trained specifically on ad creative and commercial production. I gave it a single instruction: research Nike's brand, identify their core audience and psychological drivers, then brainstorm concepts. It came back with ten directions. The top three were "Gravity Quit First," "Run Through the Archive," and "Winning Has Teeth." Solid, but I wanted something bigger, space travel, nostalgia, something that felt both ancient and futuristic.

The GPT came back with a concept called First Steps: a cinematic Nike spot that treats space exploration as the ultimate performance category. The tagline, "Every giant leap begins with a step", wrote itself. From there, it generated a full script and a shot-by-shot breakdown: launchpad, ladder descent, lunar impact, Mars approach, rocket touchdown, astronaut emerging, first steps on Martian dust in a futuristic Nike boot.

That's a complete brief. And it took about five minutes.

If you want to build your own version of this GPT, I've made it available for free, grab the Marketing Genius Custom GPT and the prompt collection below. You can also build your own from scratch, I've written a full guide on how to build a custom GPT without any coding.

One Subscription Instead of Five#

Once you have your shot list and prompts, you need four capabilities: image generation, image-to-video animation, voiceover, and music. That's typically four separate tools, four separate billing cycles, and four separate interfaces to context-switch between.

I run all of it through Artlist. Their toolkit gives you NanoBanana 2, NanoBanana Pro, Kling 3.0, Sora, VO3.1, ElevenLabs voiceover, and a stock music catalog, all under one subscription. When you're moving fast and generating a dozen shots in a session, not having to re-authenticate or track usage across platforms actually matters.

Generating Images: NanoBanana 2 as the Default, Pro as the Fallback#

For each shot, the GPT generates two prompts: a starting image prompt and an ending image prompt. The starting image becomes your reference for the video animation. The ending image shows the model where the scene should land.

I default to NanoBanana 2 for image generation because the cost-to-quality ratio is strong for most shots. For the rocket launch sequence, it nailed the Saturn V on the first pass, the USA lettering, the smoke, the angle. I used that image as a reference for the lift-off shot, and the continuity held.

But here's where the workflow gets real: AI fails unpredictably on specific shots. The astronaut descending the ramp came back with him going up the ramp. Wrong direction, wrong energy for the scene. That's when you switch models. I reprompted with NanoBanana Pro and got exactly what I needed. Same thing happened on one of the Mars shots, NanoBanana 2 couldn't replicate what I was after, Pro delivered it cleanly.

This isn't a fallback. It's a deliberate tactic. Use NanoBanana 2 by default, keep Pro in your back pocket for the shots that aren't landing. I go deeper on when to use NanoBanana 2 vs. NanoBanana Pro if you want the full breakdown.

The Mars Problem (and Why It Doesn't Matter)#

AI image models have no training data for Mars. No one has photographed the surface in a way that's been ingested at scale, and certainly not with a Nike astronaut standing on it. I was genuinely curious whether the models would produce anything usable.

They did. The establishing shot of the Martian surface, the rover touchdown, the hatch opening, all of it came together with the same prompting approach used for the Earth-side shots. The model filled in the gaps, and the results were coherent enough to animate.

For the video animation, I used Kling 3.0 throughout, Pro version, 7 seconds, 16x9 with audio, no negative prompt. The video prompt from the GPT goes directly into the Kling interface. That's the pipeline: GPT generates the prompt, Artlist runs the image generation, Kling animates it. The whole Mars sequence took a few minutes.

Voiceover and Music in Under Five Minutes#

Back in Artlist, the voiceover tab gives you ElevenLabs V2, V3, Minimax, and Kitsai Sonic. I went with ElevenLabs V3 and auditioned a few voices. The one labeled "astronaut" landed closest to what the script needed, something between exploration documentary and sports campaign. I pasted in the voiceover copy from the GPT, generated it, regenerated twice to get the intonation right on the key lines, and had a final take in under a minute.

For music, I filtered Artlist's stock catalog by genre (cinematic) and mood (epic, powerful, uplifting). The first track I pulled was the one I used. That genuinely doesn't happen often, but it happened here.

The finished commercial, concept, images, animation, voiceover, music, came together in a single session. "Nike, if you want to use this, contact me."

If you're a solopreneur or freelancer looking to build a portfolio of AI commercial work, this is a viable starting point today. Pick a brand, run it through the custom GPT, follow the sequence, and you'll have something client-presentable by the end of the session. The tools are accessible, the workflow is repeatable, and the output quality is genuinely there.

For more on what AI tools are worth paying for right now, I've tested 40+ over the past year, the ones I actually kept are in The 7 Best AI Tools for Solopreneurs in 2026.

If you found this useful, these videos go deeper:

• AI Video Workflow Deep Dive
• Kling 3.0 Full Walkthrough

Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/OI_YYK8vDNc

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