At this point, I am pretty sure you have heard about OpenAI’s latest AI model, GPT 6 Astra, or at least saw a post about it on social media. The model, besides being so token-hungry, has been really good in a lot of ways.
I used to build stuff on Codex back in the day, and it is amazing to see how far the technology has evolved from simple text completion to complex reasoning. The compute cost makes sense when you see the actual output quality.
I’ve actually written a separate post about it. Check out the eight cool things people have used Astra for in the article below.
8 Cool Things People Use Gpt 6 Astra ForIt is also great at research and writing, and works incredibly well with third-party platforms such as the desktop tool After Effects and a browser-based design platform, Topview AI.
Seeing an LLM operate as an autonomous agent inside a video editor completely changes the creative process. You no longer have to jump between five different tabs just to generate a single usable clip.
In this guide, let’s talk about what is new with the Astra model, how to set it up on Topview, and the different ways you can use it to make awesome videos.
Let’s get started.
What’s new in GPT 6 Astra?
Before we jump into the tutorial, it helps to understand why everyone is suddenly switching their workflows to this specific model. OpenAI did not just increase the context window here. They changed how the AI understands the tasks you give it.
- Native visual understanding: Older models had to translate text into images and hope for the best. Astra processes everything in a unified way. When it reads a character description, it understands the spatial dimensions of that character.
- Proactive reasoning: Instead of just spitting out an answer immediately, Astra takes a moment to plan. It acts like a real director. It looks at the script, figures out the necessary camera angles, and builds a logical sequence before it even starts generating the video prompts.
- Contextual memory over long projects: If you are generating a three-minute video, you need the last scene to remember what happened in the first scene. Astra excels at this. It remembers that a character left their jacket in the previous shot and ensures they are not wearing it in the next one.
You can learn more about what is new in Astra and how people are using it in the article below.
8 Cool Things People Use Gpt 6 Astra ForUsing GPT 6 Astra For AI Videos
There are many ways to create AI short films right now, but one that I highly recommend is using Topview AI. It’s got some of the most advanced video generation tools out there and also supports the latest and most powerful models like Seedance 2.5 for video and GPT 6 Astra for agents.
Most platforms force you to piece everything together manually, but Topview built an entire ecosystem around making the generation process seamless.
To get started, head over to topview.ai and create an account. For this demo, I will be using the Canvas tool to create a mini AI film. I will also set the agent’s model to GPT 6 Astra as shown in the image below.
You want to make sure you select the correct model in the dropdown so you can take advantage of the advanced reasoning I mentioned earlier.
Topview Canvas dashboard with GPT 6 Astra agent. Image by Jim Clyde Monge
For the story and script, let’s combine the “Short Film Scriptwriter” skill and the following prompt.
Prompt: story about an imaginative eight-year-old named Leo and his scruffy, endlessly patient rescue mutt, Barnaby. Set the scene on a crisp autumn afternoon where the two are exploring the woods behind their house, pretending to be brave knights on a quest to find a hidden treasure. Focus on the quiet, unspoken bond between them as Barnaby faithfully plays along, fetching magic sticks and guarding their cardboard-box castle, ultimately showing how a simple day of make-believe highlights the deep, comforting magic of a child’s friendship with their dog.
Topview Canvas dashboard example. Image by Jim Clyde Monge
A new workspace will be created and the agent will start planning how the story and media assets will come together. It will also ask you a series of questions, so make sure to answer them in the floating chat interface at the right side of the workspace.
This is an important step. The agent wants to know exactly what kind of pacing and emotional tone you are aiming for, so giving it good answers here saves you a lot of editing time later.
Slowly, as you answer the questions and the story becomes more clear to the agent, scenes start to appear as nodes on the center of the screen.
Sample AI film generated with Topview Canvas. Image by Jim Clyde Monge
Watching the nodes connect in real time gives you a great visual representation of how the AI is structuring your narrative.
In many months of using Topview’s Canvas tool, here are some of the major improvements I’ve noticed after switching to GPT 6 Astra.
- Better scenes and dialogues: I’ve noticed a big improvement in the quality of the stories the agent generates. It’s asking the right questions and I noticed that I have less tweaking to do than before. The dialogue actually sounds like something humans would say instead of the usual stiff robotic lines we get from older models.
- Faster generation: This is probably one of the best improvements. The faster story generation keeps my creative flow consistent and I can do more videos than before. When you do not have to sit around waiting for ten minutes just to see a script draft, you can experiment with completely different concepts on the fly.
- More control: As I’ve said, Astra is asking the right questions here. For example, I noticed that it asked me if I wanted to do a micro film, a short emotional story, or a full feature film. This didn’t happen before, so I am glad that it asks me this and does all the needed work for me. It basically acts as an assistant director that anticipates what the project needs.
Sample AI film prompt generated with Topview Canvas. Image by Jim Clyde Monge
I continued with the next series of steps, like storyline confirmation, script writing, and finally the scene generation.
Here is a sample scene created by Astra:
Scene: late afternoon EXT cardboard castle in Autumn Woods Behind the House
Cast: Leo — Woodland Knight ; Barnaby — Patient Rescue Mutt
Use Leo — Woodland Knight
for eight-year-old Leo's face, tousled brown hair, moss-green sweater, brown trousers and boots, and russet play cape. Use Barnaby — Patient Rescue Mutt
for his rescue dog's medium-sized build, scruffy tan-and-charcoal coat, asymmetrical ears, and collar. The character sheets supply appearance, not panel layouts. Autumn Woods Behind the House
supplies the leaf-covered clearing, oak, homeward path, geography, and autumn daylight, now gently later in the same afternoon. Leo and Barnaby's Cardboard Castle
supplies the brown box den, broad arched entrance, doorway flap, tape repairs, right-hand square window, crayon shields, and uneven battlements. The castle stands on the level patch beside the oak as in the earlier memory; ignore its reference image's plain background. Leo brings the same ordinary brown bark-covered crooked stick, forked at one end, back from the quest.
This is what the nodes should look like on your screen:
Sample AI film project using Topview Canvas. Image by Jim Clyde Monge
Here’s a sample scene generated with Seedance 2.5:
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Pretty cool, right? Now, continue to generate the rest of the scenes and let the agent stitch them all together to produce the final video. You can sit back and let the platform do the heavy lifting.
Awesome! I was able to create this lovely video in less than 30 minutes with GPT 6 Astra and Seedance 2.5. The quality is so good, and their facial expressions capture the essence of the dialogue perfectly. The scene transitions are great, every scene looks contextually correct, and the story is short but very well executed.
Crazy to think how many days this would take for an artist without access to these AI models. You would normally have to render every single frame, check the lighting, and manually adjust the character rigs just to get five seconds of usable footage.
Why should you care?
A few years ago, making a two-minute animated short with two consistent characters, an autumn woodland set, and matching lighting across every shot meant a small team and a few weeks. Storyboard artist, character designer, animator, editor.
