3.1 – Article to Video Lesson

Lesson Overview

This lesson focuses on Pictory’s “Article to Video” feature—an automated tool for generating videos from online written content. By pasting a blog or article URL, Pictory extracts the main text and divides it into scenes. Users can then select, add, or exclude scenes to shape the video’s narrative.

This process solves the challenge of manually creating video content from scratch, especially for businesses, creators, and marketers who regularly produce written material. By converting articles into videos, you can expand your audience on platforms favoring video content without rewriting your message for each format.

While Pictory’s AI efficiently summarizes and arranges sections, fine-tuning is recommended so the final product matches your intent. You may need to adjust scene selection or visuals, especially for specialized topics. This method is most valuable for original articles or when you have permission to use the content, allowing you to repurpose your work for broader distribution.

Overall, this lesson builds practical skills for turning existing articles—like blog posts or press releases—into dynamic videos. It’s useful for efficiently promoting your content or explaining topics through visual storytelling.

Who This Is For

If you want to expand your article-based content into engaging videos with minimal editing, this lesson is a fit. It serves:

• Content creators looking to repurpose articles as videos
• Marketers aiming to boost engagement across platforms
• Small business owners or bloggers wanting shareable multimedia
• Educators transforming study materials into visual resources
• Anyone with original written content seeking automation in video production

Where This Fits in a Workflow

Pictory’s article-to-video process is best used right after you finish an article, blog post, or press release you’d like to promote in video format. For example, after publishing a new tutorial on your site, you can quickly submit its link to Pictory, adjust the generated scenes, and share the resulting video on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Similarly, if your team produces regular news updates or written guides, converting them to video keeps your audience engaged in various formats and extends your content’s reach.

This lesson fits as an efficient “bridge” between writing and video publishing, streamlining your workflow and supporting consistent content distribution.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Traditionally, making a video from an article required scripting, storyboarding, sourcing visuals, and video editing—tasks that can take hours or days. With Pictory, you shorten this workflow to minutes by letting AI handle extraction and initial scene setup.

For instance, instead of copying sections from your article, pasting them manually, and creating a timeline from scratch, Pictory generates scenes automatically. You can then refine or replace visuals, add branding, and quickly export a share-ready video.

This approach is especially effective when you need to produce several videos per week or want to rapidly test content performance on video-based platforms. It saves effort, maintains message consistency, and lets you focus on personalizing the key moments—rather than rebuilding your video from the ground up each time.

Practice Exercise

To apply what you’ve learned, select an article or blog post you’ve written (or have permission to use).

1. Copy the URL of your article and use Pictory’s article-to-video workflow to generate the initial video.
2. Review the suggested scenes, removing any that don’t fit and highlighting important sentences for new scenes.
3. Edit a scene’s visual selection to better align the video’s imagery with your message.

After you finish, compare the resulting video to your original article. Which details did the AI select well, and which needed your correction? Consider how much time this approach saved versus manually building the video.

Course Context Recap

This lesson marks your introduction to Pictory’s article-to-video automation, building on prior knowledge of turning scripts into videos. While earlier lessons covered manually inputting and editing a script, this chapter lets you start from a published article link. Up next, you’ll see how to make direct edits to your videos using text, opening the door to quick revisions and further customization. Continue through the course to sharpen your skills in efficient and effective video creation.