Google Flow

Two things to know before you start. Google Flow requires anyone who logs in to be 18 or older, that is Google's own rule for the service. If the person who will use the service is not yet of legal age, the account can be owned by someone in the company who is 18 or older, and that person sits with them when the clips are created. Flow works in Sweden, the service is on the list of countries where it is open, and you can use it without paying: each account gets 50 credits per day. Clips with the cheapest model cost 10 credits each, so about five clips a day for free. This is the situation when this was written, September 2026.

What you get out of this

You can make short product films for Instagram, TikTok and Youtube without a camera, without lighting and without anyone in the company needing to know how to edit video. A text description in, a cinematic clip of at most eight seconds out, with sound. That is enough for a product teaser before a launch, a mood image for an ad or a loop running on a screen in the store or at a trade fair.

What you do not get out of it: a film that shows your actual product. Flow makes up everything it draws. If you want to show the real candlestick or the real soap, you have to film it yourself with your phone, and then Flow can contribute the surroundings, a background or a transition between two images. That difference determines how you plan your film, so take it seriously right now.

What you need before you start

• A Google account belonging to someone who is over 18. Company accounts in Google Workspace are often locked by the administrator, so a private account is usually easier.
• A computer with Chrome or another browser built on Chromium, such as Edge or Brave. Flow is also available as a mobile app, but editing is more cramped on a small screen.
• The address labs.google/fx/tools/flow, which is the entry point to the tool.
• A ready idea of what the clip should show, written in English. Flow accepts Swedish prompts, but descriptions in English give more consistent results because the model is trained most heavily on English text.
• If you want to include your own images: one or more product photos taken in daylight against a calm background, in jpg or png.

Time and difficulty level

Allow a quarter of an hour for the first clip: five minutes to get into the tool, five to write the prompt, five to wait and download. If you want a clip you actually dare to publish, it takes closer to an hour, because the first attempts rarely turn out well. The difficulty level is low. The hardest part is not the technology but writing a description that gives you what you had in mind, and you only learn that by generating again.

How to do it: your first clip

1. Go to labs.google/fx/tools/flow and click Get started. Sign in with your Google account. The first time, you have to accept the terms for Google Labs, which is Google's division for services that are still being tested.
2. Click + New project at the top left. A project is a folder where all the clips and images you create for the same campaign end up. Name it something you recognize, for example the name of the product.
3. Write the description in the prompt box at the bottom. Be specific about four things: the subject, the setting, the light and the camera movement. An example that works: Close up of a handmade beeswax candle burning on a wooden table, soft morning light from a window, slow push in, shallow depth of field. That gives a calm clip with the camera slowly moving closer.
4. Click the model name in the prompt box, it says Nano Banana Pro by default, and select Video. Now you switch from image generation to video, which is easy to miss.
5. Set four things in the same panel: aspect ratio, number of clips per generation, model and length. Choose 9:16 for Instagram and TikTok, 16:9 for Youtube. Choose the model Veo 3.1 Lite while you are testing, it costs 10 credits against 20 for Fast and 100 for Quality. A clip with Lite is at most eight seconds, but you can extend it afterwards with the Extend function.
6. Click Generate and wait. The generation usually takes one to three minutes. Failed generations are not charged, so a clip that never finishes costs you no credits.
7. Look at the result in the grid on the right, where all the images and clips in the project are collected. Hover over the clip and use the download icon to save it as mp4 on your computer.

How to do it: mix in your own images

1. Open the same project and click the model name in the prompt box, select Video and then Frames. This mode builds a clip between two still images that you choose.
2. Drag a product image to the + Add start frame box and another image to + Add end frame. If you only have one image, the start frame is enough, and the clip becomes an animation of it.
3. Describe the transition in the prompt box, for example slow pan to the right, product stays in focus, warm light. Here you also choose the camera movement in the menu, with modes such as dolly in and pan left.
4. Click Generate. The product will move and change somewhat, because the model redraws every frame. It rarely gets colors and small details in logos exactly right.
5. If you instead want to control only the style without locking exact frames: select Video and then Ingredients, upload your images with the Add button and write in the prompt how they should be used, for example use the color palette and mood from these images.

How to know it worked

The clip plays in the project grid, you can download it as an mp4 file, and the file opens in your phone's gallery. The credit counter, shown in the account menu at the top right, has dropped by 10 for each Lite clip generated. If you post the downloaded clip on Instagram or TikTok, it fills the whole screen if you chose 9:16, with no black bars at the top or bottom.

You also see a small Veo label in the corner of the clip. It comes with the free account and the cheaper subscriptions, and it is meant to be there. In addition to that label, Google embeds an invisible watermark called SynthID in every clip, which makes the material traceable as AI-generated even after it has been cropped or compressed. Take that into account: a customer or a competitor can see that the clip is AI, no matter how you crop it. The most honest approach is to state it in the post.

If something goes wrong

• The page says the service is not available. This is almost always about the account, not the country, since Sweden is among the countries where Flow is open. A Google Workspace account linked to an organization is often disabled for Labs services by the administrator. Sign in with a private account instead, and check that the account belongs to someone who is over 18.
• The credits run out in the middle of your work. The 50 free credits are refilled once a day, counted from your first use that day, and are not saved for the next day. So plan ahead: write all your prompts first, then generate, instead of burning credits on small adjustments. A Lite clip costs 10, a Fast clip 20 and a Quality clip 100, so a single Quality generation eats up two days of free quota.
• People in the clip look strange. Hands, eyes and text on signs are still the hardest thing for the model. Rewrite the prompt so that people end up in the background, are out of focus or are seen from behind, or remove them completely and let the product carry the clip.
• The product does not look like your product. That is expected in text mode, because the model draws from scratch. Switch to Frames and upload your own photos, or film the product with your phone and use Flow only for backgrounds and transitions.
• The clip turns out too short for what you had in mind. Eight seconds is the limit per generation with Veo 3.1 Lite. Use Extend on the clip to make it longer, or make three or four clips that match in subject and lighting and edit them together in your phone's own video editor or in the Youtube app. Write the same scene description word for word in every prompt, that keeps the style consistent.
• The sound does not fit. The models add sound automatically, sometimes with speech in the wrong language. Turn off the sound in the clip and add music in the app you publish in, which also gives you licenses for the music that Flow does not provide.
• Generation after generation turns out flat and boring. The prompt is too short. Add lighting, camera movement and a depth of field. The difference between a candle on a table and the example in step 3 is the whole difference between a product image that moves and something that looks filmed.

What you do next

With the clips done, you need the rest of the campaign in the same style: images, headlines and ad copy. You do that in Get started with Pomelli, which builds a brand profile from your website and then produces material that matches it. If you are going to write scripts or come up with ideas for more clips, Get started with AI Studio is the next step, and if you need a page to link the clips to, you start with Get started with Stitch.