A reel in your brand, scene by scene

Short vertical video is where a lot of attention goes now, and it is the format most small teams skip. Not because they do not want to, but because a reel is a different craft: a hook in the first second, text that can be read before it disappears, images that move, and all of it still looking like you.

ANVL now makes reels. You order one in the conversation like any other material: a 15-second reel about our autumn menu.

The storyboard comes first

Before anything is rendered you get a storyboard: one image and one headline per scene, in the same editor as presentations. The storyboard costs no credits. Click a text in a scene to rewrite it, or the image to swap it from your image bank or to show where the subject is. The zoom moves towards the subject, and the headline goes on the other side so it never covers a face.

Order, length and pace you change in the chat: swap 1 and 2, make it 15 seconds, make it calmer. Every change can be undone, and colleagues can comment scene by scene.

When the storyboard is how you want it, press Approve and render.

The length you choose, and time to read

You pick the length, 10, 15, 20 or 30 seconds, and ANVL works out how many scenes fit. The length holds: ask for ten seconds and you get ten, also after you change something in the chat.

Every scene stays on screen long enough for its text to be read, and the text is written for that time. If the brief has more to say than the length allows, the texts get shorter. No scene is dropped quietly: in a list every point stays, so three ways is three.

Your own photos first

ANVL picks an image per scene from your image bank, by its description, and moves it slowly under the graphics. Where the bank has nothing that fits, a new image is made in your image style. The chat tells you how many images came from the bank and how many are new. The better your images are described, the better the choice.

If the reel shows your products and the bank has no pictures of them, the images that are made show products you do not have. Such a scene is marked Generated product, and ANVL asks whether you want to swap the images before you render. A price, a guarantee or an offer is only written if your brief mentions it.

The right kind of reel for what you want to say

ANVL reads the brief and chooses how the reel should tell it: a collection, a product in focus, before and after, a list, a launch, or a story building to a reveal. Each has its own rhythm. Five products become five product scenes, not more. The reel always opens with a hook, a short line that makes someone stop, and the whole reel builds towards one message.

Every scene designed for its image

This is the part a template cannot do. ANVL lays out each scene for that particular image: where the headline sits, whether it is on a card, a colour field or straight on the photo, whether the image fills the frame or only part of it. Text and graphics go where the image is calm, so the subject stays visible.

Everything is drawn from your brand: colours, typefaces and logo, and all text sits on colour pairs that pass accessibility requirements. If you have a brand guide it is followed. A colour the guide keeps sparing never becomes a surface, and if the guide forbids capitals, nothing is in capitals.

Not every scene needs an image. A promise, a date or the end card often stands stronger as big type on your colour. The logo and a shape travel with you from scene to scene, and the words come in one at a time and stay until the scene ends.

And then the same tools as everything else

After each reel there is the same receipt as for other formats: how the pace is, what the review thought of each scene, and buttons for what can be fixed, like Redraw scene 3. A reel can be shared with a link, where the recipient sees the video, not the stills. It can get a variant, go through approval, and move to another format. A deck or a post can become a reel, and a reel can become a post, a carousel or a poster.

Why it matters

If you are evaluating ANVL: a reel is the format where brand consistency usually breaks first, because it is made in a different app by whoever has time. Here it is made from the same brand, the same images and the same rules as the rest of your material, and you see every scene before it costs anything.