How to Create Viral Time Travel Vlogs with AI

Welcome back to The Signal, a newsletter where I share stories, trends, strategies and insights to help you level up as an creator or entrepreneur.

Today’s topics:

• How to Create Viral Time Travel Vlogs with AI

• Ideas on how to monetize “Immersive Edutainment”

How to Create Viral Time Travel Vlogs with AI

Alright, if you haven’t seen the ultra-viral time travel vlogs, “Chloe vs History” is probably the best example.

I think this is a brilliant use of AI, and a format/technique that can be widely adopted across a ton of different formats, that will all crush on social right now.

I’m really bullish on this “immersive edutainment” style.

Let’s get started. We will be using Freepik, which is my favorite for any professional project. Here is my referral link to get you 20% off.

First, here is the MASTER PROMPT SHEET. We will be referring to this throughout the tutorial.

Step 1: Generate Your Character’s Face

Go to the image generator in Freepik, and choose Nano Banana Pro as the model.

Use the “base character prompt” in the sheet, and replace the details with your character preference. You can use your favorite LLM to refine this for you.

For example, you can use Claude, paste in the prompt, and ask it to generate you a version for whatever type of character you can imagine. Feel free to be as detailed as possible here. Your creativity in generating a truly unique character will go a long way.

If you are generating a character based on your own reference photos, here’s what to do:

Upload your photos as references in Freepik, then use the “Base Character Prompt (Using Your Own Reference Photos)”

Step 2: Generate Your Character’s Body

Use the Body Creation Prompt from the prompt sheet to generate your character’s body. Again, you’ll note a recurring theme here — use your favorite LLM to refine the prompt into exactly what you’re after.

Step 3: Generate Reference Sheets for your Character’s Face and Body

This is a very important step for character consistency. use the Character Face Reference Sheet and Character Body Reference Sheet prompts to create these.

Tip: ask your favorite LLM to give you a version of the prompt with different expressions that you may want to use in your creations:

Step 4: Create or Generate Your Script

Now you need a script to drop yourself into.

You can create your own, or use Claude or ChatGPT to generate one for you.

The first option is to search for “Time Travel Vlog” in the GPT store and start a conversation with it.

This is the easiest way to do it:

Or you can just use Claude, and conversationally describe exactly what you’re looking for:

Claude orchestrates a full production document with all of the prompts!

Check out an example of what it produced based on the above script.

Step 5: Use your Generated References to Create the Wide-Angle Historical Selfie Prompt

Add all of your newly created character references into the image generator.

Tip: you can also use these to create a character in Freepik that you can reference any time you want.

Now enter the UGC Wide-Angle Selfie Prompt - Historical Reference prompt OR the prompts generated by GPT/Claude.

Again, use Claude or your favorite LLM to refine this prompt into any historical scene (or any scene in general) that you can think of!

Step 6: Turn Your Selfie into a Video

Now that you have your selfie created, it’s time to turn it into a video and bring your scene to life.

Go to the video generator in Freepik, select Kling 3.0 and add your selfie as the start image.

Enter the Video Prompt with Dialogue (again broken record time, modify manually or with an LLM to fit the exact scene and dialogue you want) make sure you have audio toggled on, select 1080P, your desired length and hit generate.

And you’re done! You now have a viral time-travel selfie video. Rinse and repeat for every scene you want and stitch them together in your favorite video editor.

Tip: If you want to use a specific voice, create it in Freepik’s voice generator, or choose on of their default templates to swap the character’s voice.

Alternative Method: Act Out The Scene Yourself and then Use Kling Motion Control

If you’re here from my Instagram video, you may have noticed that I showcased this technique.

Basically, how it works is that you first act the scene out yourself regularly using your phone.

Take a screenshot of yourself, and use Nano Banana Pro to change it into whatever you can think of:

Then, head over to Freepik and select Kling Motion Control:

Add your start image (the one you just generated in Nano Banana Pro) and the reference video, and hit generate.

Now you’ve just changed your performance into whatever you can imagine. This works extremely well but requires a lot more effort of course.

Ideas on How to Monetize This Technique

The same techniques applied in the time travel tutorial, can be used in so many different ways, with many different monetization paths.

Think about a space/science version of Chloe. Or a character that educates people on AI. Maybe you’re not comfortable being in front of a camera, but you have a lot of knowledge you’d like to turn into an info product. You could create a character to represent you.

Here’s how you can monetize this.

Surface Brand Extension for Celebrities and Creators

The Dor Brothers just recently collaborated with Logan Paul. They created a film using his likeness (Logan provided the actual voiceovers!)

There is a major demand for this for story-driven narratives like this as celebrities and creators seek to scale their brand, without having to travel or film in person.

I have several “AI filmmaking” friends who have endless inbound from brands and celebrities looking to do just that, and there isn’t a supply to satiate that demand just yet.

“Living Textbook” Subscription / Media Library

Think about a Patreon or Circle community which is a continuously growing library of immersive historical episodes organized by era and topic or contemporary episodes about a certain educational topic.

Price it at $20/month and you're undercutting every educational content provider while delivering something way more engaging.

Enterprise/B2B Content

Think of how absurdly boring and sterile corporate training videos or enterprise marketing collateral is.

Maybe a pharma company wants to visualize the history of medicine.

Same production pipeline but a completely different buyer and price point.

Brand Sponsorships, Affiliate Partnerships and Info Products

If you have a viral “AI edutainment character,” there are a lot of fast-growing generative AI startups and unicorns alike that are always seeking creators to help showcase the ability of their platforms and models.

Most have affiliate programs freely available for anyone to sign up to.

For example, this Freepik link, is an affiliate code. If you sign up using the link, you get 20% off but I also receive 20% commission.

Or you can sell courses on how to create them, and funnel the attention into sales by using a Manychat CTA in every caption.

You can literally just repurpose this article into your own course 😅 – I don’t care.

Hope this was helpful.

Roberto Nickson

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