AI Visuals Made Easy: Nano Banana + Hailuo

In this episode of Automate Your Agency, Alane and Micah dive into one of Google’s most exciting new AI tools: Nano Banana (yes, that’s its real name). They share how they’ve been using it to create professional-quality images, fix bad speaking photos, merge visuals, and even iron out wrinkles — all in seconds.

But that’s not all. They also reveal how pairing Nano Banana with Hailuo AI Video can bring still images to life, letting you create unique animations for content, presentations, and social media.

You’ll learn:

• How to access Nano Banana in Google AI Studio (and avoid the impostor sites).
• Real examples of editing, enhancing, and merging photos.
• How to generate diagrams, infographics, and illustrations with simple prompts.
• The workflow of combining Nano Banana with Hailuo to create animations you can layer into Canva, Final Cut, or Premiere.
• Why these tools are game-changers for content creators, educators, and agency owners.

📌 Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Google AI Studio (Nano Banana)
• Hailuo AI Video
• Kling AI

Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links. This means that at no additional cost to you, we may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Thank you for supporting the podcast!

For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

Want more valuable content and helpful tips?

Explore our Courses/Programs:

• Complete our self-paced Process Mapping course

Enjoy our Free Tools:

• Free Asana, ClickUp, or Monday.com Selector Tool
• Get 25 Free Custom Automation Ideas for your Business

Connect with Us:

• Join our Community
• Follow us on LinkedIn
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel

Transcript

0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate Your Agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips, and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable. Operations.

0:00:18 - (Micah): So, Alane, if you go on YouTube, all you see right now is Nano.

0:00:23 - (Alane): Banana, which I've been on YouTube and I'm not getting Nano Banana. I'm getting all the comedians.

0:00:28 - (Micah): You're not getting Nano Bananaed?

0:00:30 - (Alane): No, I'm getting all the comedians like Theo Von that I like.

0:00:34 - (Micah): Okay, well, your algorithm and my algorithm is clearly different. So if you're listening, have fun. Okay, I get. I mean, hey, we all use YouTube for different things, so I understand that, but if you are searching for AI stuff on YouTube, you've probably seen thumbnails or videos on Nano Banana. And I thought it'd be fun to kind of talk about that today because we've been using it and honestly, it's one of my new favorite AI things that are out there right now.

0:01:03 - (Alane): And we're using it in different ways so we can talk about it and how we like to use it individually.

0:01:08 - (Micah): That's right. Each. Each individually. Who wants to go first? Should we podcast arm wrestle?

0:01:13 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:01:14 - (Micah): Okay.

0:01:15 - (Alane): How do you do that? I don't know.

0:01:17 - (Micah): I'll just let you go first.

0:01:18 - (Alane): Okay.

0:01:19 - (Micah): That's too. Too technically complicated for this episode. And so real quick, before you go further, we should probably explain the. What Nano Banana is.

0:01:28 - (Alane): Oh, yeah, that's a good idea.

0:01:31 - (Micah): All right, so I'll. I'll start. You add from your perspective. It's put on, it's made by Google, so you can go to Google's AI studio, you can use it for free. And it's in combination of AI image generation and AI image editing. So you can give it a couple photos and ask it to combine them, or you can give it one photo and ask it to edit it and change it, remove the background, different things like that, that you would normally have to go to Canva or Photoshop and do a lot of manual work on, but you can also just give it a prompt and it'll generate an image.

0:02:08 - (Micah): Now what's different about this is it's super fast. We're talking really fast for generating high quality, super impressive images. People aren't missing fingers and stuff like that. But when it comes to image editing. So now that was my. My quick explanation. Alane, you're already working on the first example, so.

0:02:30 - (Alane): Well, Micah, I want to. You said something really important that I made the mistake on early on that, I want to make sure that we clarify. Don't go to Nano Banana and create an account. That is what's happening.

0:02:44 - (Micah): That's fun to say. It's. Oh, yeah, there is. That's absolutely right. There's like a squatter. I don't know. There's like a. It's not Google.

0:02:52 - (Alane): Yes. So don't do that. And I'm like, micah, how do. How are you even using this? Like, it's telling me I have to pay for. And I was in the wrong place. So make sure you go to the Google Studio AI that. And that is where you play around with Nano Banana. What's that?

0:03:11 - (Micah): Yes, it's the Google AI Studio. So just search Google AI Studio and it won't say Nano Banana. Just go to the AI Studio, type in your prompt and ask it to make images and it'll make it in a few seconds.

0:03:25 - (Alane): Yes. All right, so now that we dug into that a bit more. So how I've been using it is I've got all these great speaking photos of me at a speaking engagement, but most of them, I'm making a stupid face. I'm halfway in the middle of a word or blinking, and so they're unusable. But I need to have photos of me speaking. So I've been uploading them and saying, can you change the woman's face to look like she's speaking but not catching her? And in the middle of a word.

0:04:00 - (Alane): And it is dynamite. I even asked it to iron my dress because it was wrinkled in one of the photos and it worked. Yeah.

0:04:08 - (Micah): That's amazing. I wish that worked in real life. You just pull a shirt out and be like, eh, I just want everybody to see this ironed. And in a few seconds it's done. That'd be amazing.

0:04:20 - (Alane): Yeah. And you mentioned when you were explaining what Nano Banana is, that you could ask it to merge two photos together. So I've done that as well, where I really liked the capture of, like, the screen on the right hand side of me speaking. But maybe in the photo that I like me in. Didn't have that. So I say, hey, will you add this screen to the photo with the woman speaking? And it. It does a great job.

0:04:45 - (Micah): Yeah, you showed me some of those examples the other day, and it's phenomenal. I'm pretty familiar with what you look like, and I wouldn't be able to tell a difference in some of them for sure.

0:04:56 - (Alane): All right, so what's the way that you've been using it? Because it's been fun to see your the things you've created too.

0:05:01 - (Micah): Yeah. So one of the things that Nano Banana stands out compared to other AI image generation tools is that it's better at text. So it can write words and get a lot of them right. Now if it's a complex image that has a ton of words on it, it does get some of them wrong. So there's still still that issue. But rather than it just creating the generic AI looking images, which most of these are not, it can also create diagrams, it can create illustrations. So, so at first I'm like, wow, we generate a lot of content and we have to build stuff. I need a visual to go with that.

0:05:39 - (Micah): And so I had it start creating like infographic style illustrations that I would then be able to use as a basis and almost like a background. And then I'd go in and do some manual editing to get it to the point where I want add the text and everything like that. And that was the start of it. And that's super cool because I get a very unique background starting diagram that I can use for content or a post and then customize it from there.

0:06:10 - (Micah): Now I've taken it a couple steps further. So we thought Google AI Studio was difficult to explain. There's a website called Hailuo, but the actual domain, hold on, I got to look it up because I can't even remember. Thankfully it's saved in my browser. It's H-A-I-L-U-O so that's Hailuo, but it's HAILUOAI.video.

0:06:38 - (Alane): So how did they ever get anybody to that website?

0:06:41 - (Micah): You know, you can Google, you can start Googling H A I L U something close like that and do AI video and you'll, you'll find it Hailuo video or Hailuo AI video. See, I can't even say I don't know, but this is cool. Yeah, there's another software out there, a website out there called Kling, K L I N G. A lot easier to say, but I've had a lot of luck with this Hailuo. And the way that it works is you, you optionally upload a starting image and you upload an ending image. What this means is you can have Nano Banana create a starting image and an ending image and then you prompt Hailuo with what you want it to animate in between.

0:07:26 - (Micah): So for example, you could have a blank diagram and a populated diagram and ask it to animate the stuff being created in that diagram. Now it still struggles with words a little bit. But if you take the words out, you all of a sudden have Autumn, an animation that you can leverage for a diagram, and then go into, like, Final Cut or Premiere Pro and throw words on top of it after that animation has been created.

0:07:54 - (Micah): It's amazing.

0:07:55 - (Alane): So I'm gonna try that in Canva. Like, you can upload a movie in Canva, and I'm gonna. I'm gonna try it because I'm not a Final Cut user that gets outta my realm, but I'm a super Canva user, so I'll try that.

0:08:11 - (Micah): I mean, report back. I'd love to. Like, that would be awesome. So you're saying you could. You could put it in Canva as the background of a video and then put your text on top of it. That's a good thing.

0:08:21 - (Alane): That's what I'm thinking. And time the text.

0:08:23 - (Micah): I bet that works. I bet you that's. That's pretty cool. So, yeah, so we can leverage, you know, photorealistic Nano Banana, whether it's illustrations, diagrams, or photos. And recently, like, I'm creating a piece of content right now that's talking about how it makes sense to not compare AI agents to, like, traditional automation. And the real question you should be asking is, well, how do I combine all these technologies? How do I combine traditional automation, how do I combine code? And how do I combine AI agents to build the strongest systems you can? Anyway, different episode for that. But I'm working on the content right now. And as I'm going through this in the beginning, I'm talking about how a lot of us as founders become bottlenecks, and we're the central point of all these questions.

0:09:10 - (Micah): And I'm watching this video play back as I'm editing some of this, and I'm going, I need a visual of this. So I go to Nano Banana and I go, hey, give me a visual of, like, a female founder who's getting asked a lot of questions by their team or some prompt like that. And it spits back this amazing image of, like, this woman with her hands like this. And it came up with the idea to put a thought balloon with, like, a vacation illustrate, like a palm tree ocean illustration in the thought bubble.

0:09:45 - (Alane): Oh, cool. So she wants to be somewhere else.

0:09:48 - (Micah): Yeah, exactly. And as a still image, my first thought was like, okay, I'll just throw that as a quick clip over me speaking. So it's like a nice quick clip to an image. And then I remembered high, low. And so in this case, I didn't put a start image. I only put an ending image. And I asked it to bring this image to life that the woman in the middle is getting asked all these questions by the people around her.

0:10:16 - (Micah): That was the entire prompt. Not paragraphs of instruction or anything like that. Just bring it to life. Here's the situation. It knocked it out of the park on the first try. And then now I have a six second clip that I can drop in that visually represents what I'm talking about in the video.

0:10:38 - (Alane): That's really cool for. I haven't done Hailuo yet. Are you on a free version or a paid version?

0:10:45 - (Micah): Um, I think I'm still on, like the free trial.

0:10:50 - (Alane): Cool. Yeah, yeah, I saw the video and I wasn't sure how you did it, so that I figured you used Nano Banana as the image generator, but I wasn't sure how you were getting the video part of it.

0:11:03 - (Micah): Yeah, so that's Hailuo. So combining those two technologies, you can do some really amazing things. Yeah, it's AI generated, but for stuff like this, I don't know, there's like, there's. Speaking of YouTube, there's a insanely popular channel called the Y Files, which is kind of like. I don't know, I don't know how I'd describe it. It's like conspiracy theory. But like, then he kind of disproves it at the end and he drops in these AI clips.

0:11:37 - (Micah): Now there's millions and millions of viewers, and I think, you know, the opposite side of this is do we build huge photo shoots? No, that doesn't make any sense. We'd have to charge a ton for all this content that we're creating just to produce something like that. Do we just have stock clips? Well, that's boring. Do we have stock images? That's boring. Do we just show my face? Well, then it's like watching this podcast. You don't want to keep watching that. You want to spice it up a little bit.

0:12:06 - (Micah): So I think the ability for us to use these tools as storytelling elements of us being able to get our points across in an educational manner is just absolutely incredible. And I'm really excited about the possibilities of this.

0:12:21 - (Alane): Yeah, I am too. Even just how I'm using it, just something so simple to be able to actually have usable photos. And Micah, you mentioned something a few seconds ago that I wanted to reiterate is these aren't stellar prompts that you have to use.

0:12:37 - (Micah): Thank you.

0:12:38 - (Alane): Yeah, I'm. I'm using like fragmented sentences. Like, not even. Like, you don't have to come up with a four part prompt. Like just chat with it and you can reach out with it too. Like I don't like the way that you did that. Can you put her back on the stage? You know, things like that. And it'll. It's just like you would in ChatGPT where you could have that conversation. Like, can you edit this? Can you do this?

0:13:03 - (Alane): And you're just having really short prompts to edit things.

0:13:08 - (Micah): Yeah, don't overthink it. A hundred percent agree with that. All right, so to summarize everything, check out Google AI Studio. The technology is called Nano Banana. It's not going to say Nano Banana on it. If it does, you're in the wrong place. Just start prompting, have it make you some images, have it edit some images, try out what's capable. You might find some really great shortcuts. And check out. I'm going to try to get this right. Hi Low AI video.

0:13:40 - (Micah): Hi lo again as spelled hailuo.video. We'll put that in the description of this podcast as well. There is no pop quiz and those two tools alone can really open up some creativity and some opportunity for being able to create stuff that you probably couldn't a few months ago.

0:14:02 - (Alane): Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate Your Agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us improve and reach more listeners. If you're looking for more resources, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai for free content and tools for automating your business. Join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:14:27 - (Alane): Bye for now.