Hype reel

Hype reel

A short music-driven cut: the strongest moving shots from the user's footage, one per beat or two, and a closing title. The music decides every cut, so the edit feels tight even though nothing on screen is fancy. The craft is restraint: one look, one typeface, at most two flashes, one or two whips, one or two speed ramps.

Everything except background music lives in one Tella Motion document: footage, grade, flashes and titles. Placed as a clip, it plays as its own short video or as the opener of an existing one. Builds on tella-transitions (flash and whip timing), tella-title-cards (the closing title) and, for vertical delivery, tella-short (phone safe zones).

Ask first

Read the video and its clips, then ask once with ask_form, guesses filled in:

• Footage: default all clips in this video. With none, offer Tella's public-domain vintage library (list_library scope vintage, a search word like "rocket" or "steam train"), or up to four AI clips (generate_video, which costs AI credits; say so).
• Length: 8, 12 (default), 15 or 30 s. At 105–120 BPM, 12 s is about 6 bars and 11–13 shots.
• Music: energetic curated tracks with their BPM (see Tracks), or the user's own upload.
• Closing title: the line plus an optional small sub line, prefilled from the video's title or what the user said. Never invent a claim, date or name.
• Shape: 16:9 (default), 9:16 or 1:1.
• Look: Archival B&W, Warm tint, Teal duotone or Natural. Natural for sharp modern footage, Archival for old footage.

Pick the moments

Scan every source with storyboards, then a denser filmstrip (250 ms apart) over a promising stretch. Rank by strong motion inside the frame (spray, sparks, smoke, wheels, a launch, a crowd surging, hands at work), then one clear subject that reads at a glance, then contrast and light (fire, flares, backlight). Skip title cards, burnt-in captions and logos, talking heads, static shots, burnt-in black borders, trademarks and brand signage. Use each clip once; only the title bed may repeat one. Vintage items become sources with add_library_item scope private (scope video is refused for vintage).

Note for each pick its source in-point, how long it stays good, the direction of motion and, for vertical, where the subject sits across the frame. Order them as a rise: a calm or wide opener, a run of fast close details, a hero shot with a speed ramp, then a slow, textured shot as the title bed.

Music and the beat grid

get_music_beats gives bpm, beatsMs and downbeatsMs; below about 0.5 confidence pick another track. Two routes:

• Background music (simplest). set_background_music at about 0.8. It starts at 0, fades in over 2 s and plays under the whole video, so it only suits a track whose first hit comes early and a reel that is its own video; use the rise as a cold open (one slow shot fading up from black, first hard cut on the hit).
• Start on the drop (stronger). Most tracks build for 10–20 s. Read the track's beats as a source and pick an in-point on the drop's downbeat (or one beat before a re-entry, so the hit lands after a short breath). Play it as an audio node inside the document with a 1.2 s fade out. Reel time = beat time − in-point. Don't also set background music.

Tracks (tested; the others are too calm):

Plan the cut

Show a table before building, one row per shot: beats, reel times, shot, in-point, speed, move. Rules that kept the examples tight:

• Cut only on beats. Most shots last 1 or 2 beats, never less than 1. Hero shots and the shot after a flash get 2.
• Downbeats carry the accents: a punch-in (scale 1.12 → 1.0 over 0.3 s, ease out) on the shot starting there; a flash on at most two (one mid-reel, one into the title); the closing title. Other shots get a slow linear push, 1.0 → 1.06.
• At most two speed ramps, one per 4 bars: slow-mo (0.45×) kicking to 4× just before a cut, or 2× landing in 0.4× after one.
• One or two whips, centred on a beat and moving with the action: horizontal for trains, boats and cars, upward for launches.
• Title on the last full bar's downbeat, sub line one beat later, held at least 2 s, then 0.5 s to black. The music fades over the last 1.2 s.

"Machine age" (Modern Tech Pulse from its drop, 0.5 s beats, 12.5 s): locomotive approaching with a push, press cylinder, sparks on the downbeat with a punch, molten pour, a drive wheel ramping 2× → 0.4× and whipping left at 4.0 s into a train under smoke, two 1-beat shots, a flash and punch on the 6.0 s downbeat, a ladle, a train at 0.45× kicking to 4× into the cut at 10.0 s, then a flash onto the title bed and "BUILT TO MOVE".

Design

• Grade: one adjustment layer over all footage, never per shot. Values per look:
  • Archival B&W: desaturate fully; levels black 0.05, white 0.9, gamma 0.95; vignette 0.45 (size 0.45, softness 0.5); mono grain 0.12, size 1.6.
  • Warm tint (mixes colour and B&W sources): vibrance +0.15, saturation −0.1; tint black → #06111d, white → #ffe6c4 at 0.45; levels 0.05 / 0.93 / 0.95; vignette 0.4; grain 0.08, size 1.4.
  • Teal duotone: desaturate; tint black → #04202b, white → #effcff at full; levels 0.05 / 0.92; vignette 0.35 (size 0.5); grain 0.1, size 1.8.
  • Natural: levels 0.03 / 0.97 and a 0.3 vignette, nothing else.
• Flash: a full-frame white fill (#fff4e6 on a warm grade, or the brand colour) at 0.85 opacity fading out over 0.2 s.
• Whip: outgoing and incoming shots overlap 0.3 s centred on the beat; one slides a full frame out as the other slides in, easeInOutCubic, both with 360° motion blur.
• Title bed: the last shot at 0.35–0.6×, blurred (about 14) and darkened to about 0.42 brightness over 0.4 s from the flash. The darkened bed is the contrast: no outlines or shadows on the type.
• Title: one bold display face, centred a little above the middle, entering on scale 1.12 → 1.0 over 0.4 s with a 0.1 s fade, then drifting to 0.97. Sub line in Inter or Space Grotesk 500–600, letter-spaced 0.28–0.32 em, at least 32 px at 1080p, rising 18 px as it fades in over 0.3 s. White or warm off-white. Tested: Archivo 800 at 160 px over Inter 600 at 32 px; Oswald 600 at 220 px in #fff4e6; DM Sans 900 at 250 px stacked on two lines (line height 0.9) for 9:16. Budget about 0.68 em per capital for Archivo and DM Sans and 0.5 em for Oswald, so a line doesn't wrap by surprise.
• Easing: easeOutCubic for arrivals, easeInOutCubic for whips, linear pushes. No bounce or spring.

Build in Tella Motion

Make the document at the delivery size, as long as the reel. For its own video, add it as a motion clip; to open an existing video, add it and reorder it to 0. Build everything in one batch, then tweak in small ones. Stack order: shots, the grade, flashes, titles, the fade to black. Give nodes readable ids (s01…, grade, flash1, title, sub) so the reel stays easy to retime.

Speed ramps are time-remap keys, all linear: eased keys stall the footage at each key, so build a smooth ramp from short linear steps (about 0.05 s). Keep the last key inside the clip's duration.

For 9:16, don't rely on cover, which crops the centre and often drops the subject: scale the media to fill the height and slide it so the subject is centred without exposing an edge. Keep the title between 10% and 80% of the frame height.

Gotchas (all hit while building the examples)

• addMedia defaults to fit: "contain", leaving bars: patch fit: "cover".
• addMedia caps a node at the clip's own length even when slowed, so the shot goes black early. trim its end after the batch.
• volume is in dB, so volume 0 is full volume. Mute footage by patching its whole audio object (assetId: "media.<sourceId>", mute: true).
• Time remap refuses audio nodes. Set a music node's in-point by patching its sourceIn.
• Keyframing blur or a blur effect's radius fails ("keyed list: write its members by id"). Set blur static and let the flash hide the switch; animate brightness, scale, opacity and position instead.
• A deleted and re-added node goes to the top of the paint order, above the grade and titles. Move it back with node.move.
• Cuts land on the next 30 fps frame, up to 33 ms late. That's fine; don't nudge.
• Archive footage is 240–480 px tall. Grain and a vignette make the upscale read as film. Don't sharpen.

Check

• Cuts: filmstrips of the document around each cut: within one frame of its beat, no black frame where a shot ran out, no bars, no half-built title. A whip shouldn't read as a cut.
• Moves: check whips and flashes in a 30 fps filmstrip, not single get_motion_frame renders, which once misreported a fast move.
• Frames: one mid-shot frame per shot for framing; full-size frames of the title and the last frame (black).
• Audio: music inside the document is in the motion preview; background music is only in the video preview. Hits line up with cuts, the level sits around −12 to −20 dBFS, no source audio leaks.
• Video: the clip length equals the reel's end.

Report the video link, length, track and BPM, the shot list with times, what to listen for, and anything guessed.

Making it your own

• 30 s: a middle section of 2-beat shots before a final 4-bar run of 1-beat cuts.
• A spoken line: land the title on its word from the transcript, keep cuts on beats, and duck the music about 8 dB under the words.
• Brand colour: for the flash and the sub line, not the grade.