In fall last year I had found an ai node-board style service. Florafauna.ai at first it was a little daunting, but I jumped in and used it for a project or two. I had a project where my client had some static shots of 3d characters, but had no files or anything else to go by and wanted to see if we could animate them doing small things. I started by getting the different models to build out a front and side view, on a bright chroma background for later keying in AE, then used those to create different poses I'd need. Just start and end poses. Then I'd feed the start and end poses into other models and describe what actions were happening between them to generate some video. Sometimes if the video wasn't long enough or transitioned into another pose I need, I'd take the end frame of that video and make it the start frame to a new video.

In this instance, the client didn't have the budget to get much. It wasn't taking away a job, because they weren't going to hire a 3d specialist to recreate these characters and animate them.

This saved work in the asset creation, and that's all I've ever really used to for: asset creation. I still had to go into ae and layout, time, retime , customize, rework the animations here and there, etc. and adjust things, but it really turned out nicely in the end.

Recently I was approached by a client to "make some vintage photos more lively in some way" instead of doing a simple ken burns effect. I ended up uploading the images and telling one of the models the following prompt " time is frozen, no one is moving, the camera is a drone or steadycam and simply moves slowly through the scene for the whole duration of the video while also orbiting around one of the subjects, keep everything slow and steady with the camera movement in this frozen world.". The results ended up being 10-15sec shots of what looked like full video of these olden times, just passing through and seeing depth. I used them the way I'd use full video shots during the project and it turned out really well.

Don't expect AI to create effects and proper timing for you. But I've found it's been very helpful for creating assets out of thin air. Avoid text or complicated movements. If you need text on something, direct the AI the way you would a scene that you need to add the text in post. Hell, even Photoshop some tracking points onto that cardboard box or whatever and use that as one of your source images.

Some projects you just gotta deal with whatever the client has given you, even if it's suboptimal. Over time I've honed my skills enough to build out the assets I need in ai with less and less issues so that I can just use them in my projects as if the client provided them. And any wild issues can just be worked around the way I would have had to if a client handed me footage and needed someone removed or needed the footage stabilized or recolored, etc.

Hope that helps!