Runway is the most widely-used AI video platform — and prompting for video is its own discipline. Static images forgive vague prompts; video does not. A prompt has to describe what is in the shot and what moves, when, and how. This guide shows you how to write video prompts that actually do what you want.
Note: Runway evolves its model line (Gen-2, Gen-3, Gen-4 and successors) and feature set quickly. Concepts here are stable; specific UI labels may change.
Runway started as a video-editing-with-AI tool and grew into a generative video studio. Today it covers text-to-video, image-to-video, video-to-video restyling, and a host of "magic tools" like green-screen, motion brush, and camera control. The platform is genuinely powerful — but the difference between an amateur clip and a usable one is almost entirely in the prompt and the reference inputs.
This tutorial covers the three main generation modes, the vocabulary that controls motion and camera, and the storyboard-driven workflow that lets you build longer pieces without the output feeling like a slideshow.
Most workflows pick one of these three starting points. Each rewards a different prompt style.
If you care about brand or character consistency, default to image-to-video. Generate the look you want as a still first, then animate.
A video prompt has two parts most beginners under-write: what moves and how the camera behaves. Get those in every prompt and your clips stop feeling like jittery photos.
A complete video prompt
Scene: a young woman walks through a quiet Tokyo alley
at night, neon signs reflecting in puddles on the pavement.
Subject motion: she walks slowly from left to right,
glancing up briefly toward a sign.
Camera: slow dolly forward, slight low angle, shallow
depth of field. No shake. Hold the framing.
Style: cinematic, anamorphic, soft teal-and-magenta colour
palette, gentle film grain.
Duration: 5 seconds.
Notice how each line answers a different question — subject, motion, camera, style, duration. Drop any one and the model has to guess.
Runway exposes explicit camera-control sliders, and even when you're using text-only prompts the model recognises a clear cinematic vocabulary. The words below are the ones to memorise.
Combining two of these is fine — "slow dolly in with a gentle tilt up" — but three or more usually fight each other and produce mushy motion.
For client work, almost everyone serious about Runway uses the same workflow.
--sref, Stable Diffusion with a LoRA, or a real photo.This pipeline turns Runway from a "slot machine" into a controlled studio tool. Visual consistency is solved upstream (in your image model); Runway only has to handle motion.
Pick a still image you like (photo or generated). Write a Runway image-to-video prompt that includes subject motion, camera behaviour, and duration. Generate two versions: one with motion, one explicitly locked off. Compare how the locked-off version feels.
Storyboard a 20-second piece as four 5-second shots before you generate anything. Write a separate prompt for each shot. Generate them, edit them together. Note how planning the cuts upfront changes the result.
Record a 5-second clip of yourself doing a simple action (walking, waving). Use video-to-video with a clear style prompt ("watercolour animation", "low-poly 3D", "1990s anime"). Notice how motion stays accurate while the look changes.
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