Astra's been out for a week and my feed is full of "look what it built in one prompt" screenshots. I wanted to know if it holds up on a brief a real client would pay for, so I ran one: local painting company, full landing page, scroll-driven hero video, live on a real domain. Here's the process and where it actually broke.
1. Do the brand work in a normal chat first.
Name, colour palette, a transparent-PNG logo, a section list ("what should a painting company's site include?"), then one image per section, asked for one at a time with a file name so I knew where each went. All of it dropped into a Project as sources. This is the step people skip, and it's why their Astra site looks like every other Astra site. The model can only be as specific as what you hand it.
2. One reference screenshot, one prompt, and make it ask questions.
Grabbed a layout I liked, attached it, and wrote: use this for general style, tailor it to a painting business, use my branding, include a hero that plays a video on scroll, and ask me any questions you need before starting.
It came back with six: section order, primary CTA, which services and locations, insurance and warranty details, one page or multi-page. Answering by number took two minutes. This single line cut more re-prompting than anything else I tried. Astra is built to ask when the answer changes the outcome, so let it. I ran it on medium effort. High didn't improve a marketing site visibly.
3. The hero video failed first, and the fix has nothing to do with the tool.
Attempt one was lazy: "animate the house into an 8-second shot." Got a slow creep toward a dark house. Looked like a burglary.
Attempt two, in a separate chat: asked for hero concepts for a painting business, chose painter's POV (crack the can, dip the brush, first stroke, pull back to the finished exterior), asked for three shot-by-shot breakdowns, picked one, had it rewritten as a per-shot prompt with motion and timing. Then generated two stills, a first frame (the can) and a last frame (the house), and fed both as start/end references alongside the shot list.
That version works. Any AI video generator that accepts start and end frames will do this. The improvement came from concept, then shot list, then locked frames. Not from the model.
4. Scope every fix.
The hero didn't play on scroll the first time. Prompt: "fix the hero playback on scroll, do not change anything else." It fixed exactly that. Unscoped "make it better" prompts are how a good build regresses.
5. Save a version before you deploy.
Every Sites deployment URL is production. Ask it to save a version without deploying so you can review first. You can list saved versions and roll back if you need to.
6. Going live is built in. You don't need a separate host.
New sites are private to you by default, which is why people think viewers "have to sign in." Open the Site's share settings and set access to anyone on the internet. For your own domain: Site settings, Add domain, paste the DNS records it gives you at your registrar, wait a few minutes. It also logs unique visitors and page views on its own, so you can skip an analytics install for a small site.
What still needed me: one paint-smear glitch on a window frame in the hero, a pass through every button, and the copy, which is competent but flat until edited. Total was about four hours including the video detour.
Is anyone getting a usable hero shot from a one-line prompt on any model, or is shot-listed plus frame-locked just the floor now?
Source: r/AIVideoLabs · by /u/Intelligent-Pie7773