How to Make UGC-Style Ads With OpenShorts

Want to make UGC-style ads without picking up a camera or hiring a film crew? OpenShorts is an open-source studio that runs on your own machine and turns a product link into a finished talking-head ad.

The repo already sits at 4K+ GitHub stars, and the self-hosted version leaves no watermark. The catch is that the studio is free, but the AI actors and voices behind it still run on paid APIs.

What You Need

• A machine of your own to self-host OpenShorts on.
• Paid API access for the AI actors and voices.

Tutorial

1. Paste a product link into OpenShorts. Everything downstream builds off that one link instead of footage you shot yourself.
2. Let the AI write the script. You do not write the copy.
3. Generate an AI actor to be the spokesperson. No camera, and no filming yourself.
4. Give the actor a voice. This is one of the parts that runs on a paid API, not on the free studio.
5. Sync the lips to that voice track.
6. Add B-roll, subtitles and hook overlays on top. That is what turns the raw talking head into a finished ad.
7. Drop in a long-form video if you want clips instead of an ad. The workflow does not stop at ads.
8. Let it find the best moments in the footage.
9. Track the speaker's face through the clip.
10. Turn them into vertical clips for TikTok, Reels and Shorts.
11. Generate thumbnails for the clips.
12. Create titles and descriptions for each one.

Wrapping Up

You now know the whole path: product link in, AI spokesperson out, and a second path that cuts long videos into vertical clips. The studio costs nothing to self-host and drops the watermark, but budget for the cloud AI that powers the actors and voices. If you already have that API access, this is a way to get finished UGC-style ads without a film crew.