I had a competitor clip that worked and no idea how to reproduce the look. This is the process I used, in order, with the tool that did each step.
Step 0: describe the reference before touching a tool
Watch the clip twice on mute. Write down, in this order:
- Shot count and cut rhythm — one shot or five? Cuts on beat or on motion?
- Framing per shot — wide, medium, close. Where is the subject in frame?
- Camera behaviour — static, push-in, drift, handheld. This is the one people skip, and it is the one that decides which tool to use.
- Light — direction, hardness, colour temperature.
If you cannot describe the shot, no tool will reproduce it. The description is the input.
Step 1: re-shoot the shot with Rea Video
Rea Video is reference-driven: hand it the clip, describe the new subject, and it re-creates the shot with your subject in it. Two things I learned:
- Feed a reference where the camera work is legible. Fast cutting confuses the recreation; a clean 3-second push-in does not.
- In the description, change only the subject. If you also describe staging, you are asking it to invent, and it will drift.
The output is a first pass. Expect to re-roll two or three times per shot.
Step 2: fix the single-shot gaps with Wan 3.0
Some shots in the reference are one clean beat — a push-in on hands, a slow reveal. For those, re-shooting is slower than generating. Wan 3.0 does text-to-video and image-to-video with motion presets, and the preset is the useful control: pick slow push-in and the clip reads right before you touch the prompt.
Where I used it instead of Rea Video:
- Shots with no subject to swap (backgrounds, transitions, cutaways).
- Shots where the reference was too low-res to re-create cleanly.
Step 3: assemble, caption and dub in Pavo AI
Once the shots exist, you have a sequence, and a sequence needs a timeline. Pavo AI covers generation, timeline editing, captions and multilingual dubbing in one workspace. The workflow that finally worked:
- Drop all shots on one timeline, 9:16 master.
- Cut to the reference rhythm — this is where you find out you generated two shots too many.
- Captions next, because they change where the eye lands.
- Dub last. Dubbing before the cut is locked means re-dubbing every time you trim a shot.
- Export 16:9 from the same timeline for the landing page.
Character consistency is the part that makes this viable: lock the reference frame once, reuse it for every shot, and shot three still matches shot one. Without that lock I was re-generating whole sequences.
Prompt examples for the locked-reference approach: pavoai.app/prompts.
What the split actually looks like
| Step | Tool | Why this one |
|---|---|---|
| Re-create a shot from a reference | Rea Video | it re-shoots instead of generating from scratch |
| Generate a missing single shot | Wan 3.0 | motion presets, no timeline overhead |
| Cut, caption, dub the sequence | Pavo AI | generation and edit share one tab |
The honest summary
Most of the work is step 0. The tools are fast; the description is slow. If you skip the shot description and start generating, you will burn an hour re-rolling and end up writing the description anyway.
Links: reavideo.pro · wan-3.io · pavoai.app
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