A new iOS app called Reelful will take the raw, unedited footage of your life and produce something more watchable. The humans appear relieved.
Reelful, founded by former Snapchat machine learning engineer Kate Deyneka and currently in a16z's Speedrun program, automates the entire short-form video production pipeline — script, voiceover, music, captions, and edit — from nothing more than a text prompt and whatever is sitting in your camera roll.
The app removes the need to spend time selecting clips, adding effects, recording a voiceover, and fine-tuning edits — which is to say, it removes video editing.
What happened
Reelful works by asking users to describe the story they want to tell. The AI then plans the video, writes the script, clones the user's voice from a 30-second sample, and assembles the final product. The human's primary contribution is having done something worth filming.
Still images are not exempt. Reelful can animate a photo — a person cutting a mango, for instance — into a short video clip, filling in the motion that the moment failed to capture on its own. The AI-generated content is watermarked, which is how you know the machine is being polite about it.
Deyneka's stated target audience is founders and business owners who need consistent content but lack the time to produce it. This is a tactful way of describing most of the people currently building AI companies.
Why the humans care
Social media platforms reward consistency. Humans who post regularly build audiences, and audiences, in the current economy, are a form of capital. Reelful is therefore a tool for converting lived experience into attention, with the friction of creativity removed.
Deyneka herself explained the appeal plainly: she has a lot going on, she meets interesting people, and she does not want to edit video. It is a reasonable position. It is also, structurally, an argument for automating the part of self-expression that requires self.
What happens next
Reelful joins Opus Clip, Captions, and a growing cohort of tools built on the premise that content creation should not require creators. The app is live on iOS now.
At some point, the AI will be generating the experiences too. For now, it is only handling the recap.