How to Make a Brainrot Video: TikTok Tutorial

You’ve seen the chaotic, nonsensical videos taking over your For You Page, and now you’re ready to create your own brainrot masterpieces. This tutorial breaks down the exact formula for making these addictively strange videos, from finding the right clips and sounds to layering them for maximum overstimulation. Follow these steps to start making content that grabs and holds attention.

What Is "Brainrot" Content, Anyway?

First, let’s get on the same page. "Brainrot" is a term affectionately used to describe a style of short-form video that is intentionally overstimulating, nonsensical, and jam-packed with meme references. These videos feel like an unfiltered stream of internet consciousness, mashing together random gameplay footage, TV clips, bizarre questions, and a wall of jarring sound effects. The term itself is ironic - the content is so low-brow and mind-numbing it's supposed to feel like it’s “rotting your brain,” yet its creation is a specific art form designed to hijack the algorithm and hook viewers with short attention spans.

Unlike polished, high-production content, brainrot videos thrive on chaos. Their appeal comes from a shared-humor sensibility built on years of internet culture. Viewers are in on the joke, and the ability to recognize all the layered memes acts as a sort of cultural handshake. For creators, it’s an effective way to generate high-engagement content that capitalizes on existing trends without needing an elaborate setup or a Hollywood budget.

The Core Components of a Brainrot Masterpiece

Every effective brainrot video is a carefully constructed mess built from a few key ingredients. Before you open your editing app, understand the anatomy of what makes these videos work so well.

1. The Passive Visual Layer

The foundation of almost every brainrot video is a background clip of some mindless, repetitive, yet oddly satisfying action. This footage isn’t meant to be the main focus, its purpose is to keep the eyes occupied while the viewer listens to the primary audio or reads the on-screen text. It's perpetual motion for your eyeballs.

• Gameplay Footage: This is the most common choice. Think Subway Surfers, Minecraft parkour maps, GTA V car stunts, or mobile game ads. The visuals are colorful and constantly moving, which is perfect for holding attention.
• Clips from Shows: Short, out-of-context clips from shows like Family Guy or SpongeBob SquarePants are extremely popular. These are usually looped or cut in a way that aligns with the meme’s pacing.
• Soapy/Slime Videos: Anything from ASMR soap cutting to colorful slime-making videos fits perfectly. The repetitive motion and satisfying texture feel right at home in a brainrot edit.

2. The Active Content Layer

On top of the passive background, you need a central piece of content that poses a question, tells a story, or presents a choice. This is the element that provides the video’s narrative or interactive hook.

• "Would You Rather" or A/B Questions: Presenting two outlandish choices, usually with meme images representing each option, is a classic format. Viewers will often watch to the end to mentally make their choice or comment on their preference.
• Storytime with AI Narration: A robotic text-to-speech voice narrating a Reddit story, a weird personal anecdote, or sheer nonsense is a staple. The monotone, impersonal voice combined with chaotic visuals is a hallmark of the genre.
• Quizzes or Trivia: Simple questions pop up on screen, often alongside a timer, encouraging viewers to watch the entire clip to see if they know the answer.

3. The Chaotic Audio Soup

Sound is arguably the most identifiable trait of a brainrot video. It’s never just one audio track, it’s a symphony of conflicting, high-energy sound effects and memes layered on top of each other. The goal is auditory overload.

• Random Sound Effects: The standard library includes the Vine boom, Roblox "oof," loud incorrect buzzer sounds, goofy cartoon sound effects (like squeaky shoes or a slide whistle), and the ever-present tactical nuke alarm.
• Meme Audio Clips: Short, recognizable audio bytes from viral videos or memes are sprinkled throughout to add another layer of in-joke humor.
• Background Music: Often, there’s an upbeat, slightly annoying, and ridiculously repetitive song playing underneath everything, like video game lobby music or a sped-up pop song.

4. Sporadic, Attention-Grabbing Text

The text on screen is rarely clean or professional. It uses default fonts, loud colors, and often contains deliberate typos or grammatical errors. The text can be the main story element or just supplementary chaos. For stories, the text at the bottom - often titled with a generic "Subway Surfers Story" - tells a separate tale from the AI narration, adding yet another layer to decode.

How to Make a Brainrot Video: A Step-by-Step Guide

Ready to make your own? Here's how to put all those chaotic pieces together. We’ll use CapCut as the example editor, since it’s free, mobile-friendly, and perfectly suited for this style.

Step 1: Gather Your Ingredients

Before you even open CapCut, save all the clips and sounds you’ll need. This will make the editing process much faster.

• Find your background video: Search YouTube for "royalty-free Minecraft parkour footage" or "longplay Subway Surfers gameplay." Screen record a segment you like or download it using an online tool. A 30-60 second clip is plenty.
• Find your foreground images/memes: If you're doing a "Would you rather...?" video, save some low-quality PNGs of relevant memes from Google Images.
• Collect your sounds: Create a folder on your phone or computer with your go-to sound effects. You can find "meme sound effect packs" on YouTube and convert them to MP3 files.

Step 2: Set Up Your Project in CapCut

CapCut is ideal for this kind of editing because its layering system (the overlay feature) is incredibly intuitive.

1. Open CapCut and start a New Project.
2. Import the background gameplay footage you downloaded. This will be your main video track.
3. Resize the project to the TikTok format (9:16) if it isn’t already. The clip should fill the whole screen.

Step 3: Construct the Visual Layers

Now you're going to stack your content on top of the background footage.

1. Add foreground content: Tap the Overlay button in the bottom menu, then "Add overlay." Select the meme images for your A/B choice. Position and resize them so they appear over the top half of your gameplay footage.
2. Time the overlays: Drag the ends of the overlay clips in your timeline to control when they appear and disappear. For a "Would you rather..." video, you might have one image appear on the left, then the second on the right.

Step 4: Create the Audio Chaos

This is where the magic happens. Your goal is to make the sound feel busy and loud without being completely unlistenable.

1. Add narrative audio: If you're doing a storytime, go to Text > Add text. Type out your sentence, then select Text-to-speech and choose a robotic voice. Hide the text box off-screen if you only want the audio.
2. Layer the sound effects: Tap the Audio button, then Sounds. Import or select the sound effects you gathered. Line them up with visual cues. Add a Vine boom every time a new image pops up. Add a loud buzzer sound. Add a silly cartoon noise for no reason at all. Overlap them slightly to build that overwhelming wall of sound.
3. Adjust volumes: You don't want every sound at 100% volume. Tap each audio clip and adjust its volume so the key sounds pop while others remain in the background. Keep the narrative voice loud enough to be understood through the chaos.

Step 5: Add Text and Subtitles

Your video needs on-screen text to guide the viewer, even if it’s totally absurd.

1. Use the "Auto captions" feature: Go to Text > Auto captions to generate subtitles for your text-to-speech audio. Choose a bold, simple font like the TikTok default. Feel free to leave in any transcription errors - they add to the charm.
2. Add questions or statements: If you're not using narration, manually add your "Would you rather live without..." text. Use a thick outline or shadow to make it stand out against the busy background.

Step 6: Posting to TikTok for Maximum Reach

Once you export your video masterpiece, it’s time to upload. Your caption and hashtags are just as important as the video content.

• Keep the caption short and simple: Something like "Would you? 🤔" or "This is unbelievable..." works well. The goal is to create curiosity.
• Use relevant hashtags: Combine broad and niche tags. Good choices include #brainrot, #brainrottiktok, #skibidi, #minecraftparkour, and #fyp. Mentioning the elements in your video (like Family Guy or Subway Surfers) in the hashtags can also help discovery.

Final Thoughts

Creating a brainrot video is less about technical perfection and more about understanding the formula of organized chaos. By layering distracting visuals, overlapping meme sounds, and posing a simple narrative or question, you can craft content that expertly catches and holds the attention of an online audience primed for maximum stimulation.

Once you master this formula and start producing high-volume, trend-based content, staying consistent becomes the biggest challenge. That’s why we built our platform to be truly video-first. With Postbase, you can upload your content once and schedule it across TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts without format issues or compression headaches - all from one clean planning calendar. We realized older tools weren’t built for this type of fast-paced video, so we created a system that makes scheduling reliable and simple, so you can focus on creating.