How to Make a Top 10 Video From a Script

The short version: write each entry so it opens with its number and name, pick the Top 10 template, and let AI Director fill each entry with pictures. Every entry then starts a scene of its own, with its number and name up big over its first picture. The rest of this guide covers the parts that usually go wrong.

Why countdown videos are harder than they look

A Top 10 is the simplest format to write and one of the fussiest to edit. Every entry needs a title card or lower third with the right number, timed to the moment the narrator says it, ten times per video, every upload. Generic script-to-video tools treat the list as ordinary paragraphs, so the numbering on screen drifts from what is said: a chapter counter shows "02" while the voice says "Number 9", and entries without a clear heading get no title at all.

Step 1: Write each entry with a clear heading

Start each entry with its number and its name, however you naturally write it. All of these are recognised:

• "Number 10 — Chernobyl"
• "No. 7: Pompeii" or "#3"
• "10. Venice" on its own line
• "At number seven, we have…" or "In fifth place…"
• "And finally…" for the last entry

The list can be any length and can count down or up. A heading line like "Number 9 — The Great Hanshin Earthquake, 1995" gets a full stop added, so the voice pauses after it instead of running it into the next sentence.

Step 2: Clean up a script written with an AI chat

Many list scripts start life in an AI chat or a web page, and they carry things you do not want read aloud: a source's name over a "+1" chip, footnote marks like [3], bare links. Read out, "University of Maryland School of Medicine plus one" sounds like a glitch. The Script step points these lines out before anything is voiced, and Remove them takes them out in one click.

Step 3: Pick the Top 10 template

The Template step of the new-project wizard reads your script and suggests the template it reads like: "Your script reads like a Top 10: 10 numbered entries found, counting down from 10". Use it with one click. The template sets up the whole edit the way a countdown is cut: the rhythm, the opening hook, the graphics the Director may use, the colour look and the headline type. Under it, What the Director will choose lists each of those choices with a switch, so you can turn off anything you do not want. It never changes which picture sources you pay for.

Step 4: Let AI Director fill each entry

Every entry starts a scene of its own, and its own number and name go up over its first picture. An entry with no picture to carry its title, all video for example, gets a rank card instead, so no entry goes unnumbered. Within each entry, AI Director plans the shots: how many, where each comes from (AI image, stock photo or stock video) and the word each one lands on.

The opening hook counts up to the list's own number, "Top 10 · Deadliest Disasters in History", and a number that only names something, like "Number 1", is never turned into a chart or a counter.

Step 5: Review, then export

Everything stays editable on the Visuals and Timeline screens. Export a 16:9 video for the main channel, or a 9:16 cut for Shorts from the same script. The wizard remembers the template, so your next list starts as a whole Top 10 again.

Using your own voiceover

If you record the narration yourself, the same entry detection works on the transcript, even one that spells the numbers out ("number seven") or has no punctuation. Scenes stay on your words for the whole recording, so entry ten is titled when you say it, not ten seconds later.

For more on the other templates, from History to Mystery, see templates and story marks, or the Top 10 channel use case.