Video Mode — Theo Reel

1. Describe the scene. Tell Theo what you want to see — subject, action, setting, lighting, mood. Theo Reel renders one continuous ~8 second shot at 1080p with native audio.

2. Pick an aspect ratio. Flip the pill at the top of the composer between 16:9 (landscape) and 9:16 (portrait / mobile). Your choice sticks per conversation — open the chat tomorrow and your last pick is still there.

3. Wait ~1–2 minutes. The card streams progress while the render lands. When it finishes you can hit play, download the MP4, share the link, or regenerate the same prompt with a single click. Theo keeps chatting in parallel — you don't have to sit and wait.

Attach an image alongside your video prompt in the composer. Theo Reel will use those pixels as the literal first frame of the clip and animate from there. The composer shows a green "Animate your image — Theo Reel will use it as the first frame" hint once an image is staged so you know the anchor is wired up.

Prompt tip: describe the motion you want, not the contents of the image. "Camera slowly pushes in past the counter as steam rises from the espresso machine" works much better than restating what's in the photo.

Safety filter: Veo's policy net rejects recognisable human faces, children, and celebrities. If the render comes back as a safety-filter error, swap the reference image (an object, scene, or stylised illustration usually clears) or describe the subject in the prompt instead of attaching their photo.

Theo Reel calls Google's Veo 3.1 directly — no storyboard pipeline, no scene-by-scene routing, no FFmpeg assembly. The durable Inngest function renders the clip, applies the Theo watermark, uploads to your private bucket, and flips the job to complete.

Need something fancier? The Creator Canvas (videos tab) still ships the full multi-engine storyboard pipeline — multi-scene renders, per-scene engine picks, voiceovers, brand overlays, music. Use Theo Reel in chat for fast singles; jump to Creator Canvas for full productions.

• Open with the subject + a strong verb: "A silver fox leaps across a frozen river".
• Add lighting + mood: "golden-hour sunlight, dust motes drifting".
• Specify the camera move when it matters: "slow dolly forward, shallow depth of field".
• Skip overly long stories — Theo Reel renders one continuous shot. If you describe five scenes, you'll get the first one rendered nicely and the rest ignored.
• If the prompt gets rejected for safety reasons, Theo surfaces the exact filter that fired so you can rephrase without guessing.

While the clip is rendering, the card shows a pulsing loader plus the current step ("Rendering with Theo Reel…", "Applying Theo watermark…", "Saving your video…"). Once complete, it swaps in the player with autoplay, loop, mute, and full controls. You can keep chatting in the same conversation while the render lands.