Sundry Works

Sundry Works Help · Reel

Making a reel of a painting

Build the vertical reel frame and video for social media.

What it's for

The Reel tab builds a 1080 × 1920 vertical reel for Instagram and Facebook. It has two main outputs: a static PNG frame (opening and closing slides), and a full narrated video with close-up detail shots of the painting.

How the tab is laid out

The strip of small pictures in "1 The slides", just under the painting, picks which slide you are looking at - one picture per slide, in the order the reel plays: Start, each close-up, the collage if you have one, and End. It picks which slide you are editing too: choose one and its settings appear below, and nothing else does. Drag a close-up along the strip to change the order, or onto Start to make it the opening shot. The + at the end starts a new close-up and opens the painting under the strip to draw it on.

A small row of the same pictures waits under the preview, and the preview and the row between them fill the right-hand side of the window, growing as you scroll. On a phone the row appears under the pinned picture once you scroll past the strip. Press one to switch slides, and that slide's settings come up to meet you, so there is no scrolling back to the top between slides.

The preview can be pressed too. Press the title, the website line, the byline, the artwork or the logo - or a collage photo, the collage heading, or the background - and the settings for that part come up and flash. Pointing at the picture lights up the part a press would reach. On a close-up, a press goes to its crop; a press on its website line goes to the Opening slide, because that is where the line is set.

The settings run in four numbered blocks. "1 The slides" is what the reel is made of - draw close-ups there, and switch the collage on. "2 This slide" is whichever slide the picker has, and for the closing and collage slides it includes their shared background. "3 Every slide" holds what all of them share: the text glow and your brand assets. "4 Make the video" comes last. The "This slide" block has a gold outline and names the slide, because it is the one that changes when you pick a slide.

Every slide and Make the video each fold away with Close beside their heading, leaving one line that says how they are set, and Open brings them back. The column remembers which you left open. Make the video starts folded, since it is the last thing you do.

The longer notes on each card wait behind the small round ? beside its heading. Press it to read them, and press it again to put them away. Warnings, and anything that explains why a control is greyed out, always stay on show.

So the Website line and Logo settings on screen belong to the slide in front of you. The words of the website line and byline, and the logo and font files, are kept under Brand assets in Every slide.

The closing slide

This is the main frame - your website line at the top, the painting's title and byline, the artwork centred in the middle, and your logo at the bottom. Pick End in the strip of slides and everything it carries is in one card, in the order the slide is drawn from top to bottom: the website line, the title's words with its size, spacing and colour, the byline, the artwork with the progress flip under it, and the logo.

The tinted overlay bands in the preview show roughly where Instagram and Facebook lay their own buttons - they're guides only and never export. Turn them off under "Sizing", beside the Make button.

With "Keep it in the same spot on every slide" ticked on the Opening slide, this slide's website-line sliders follow that one and are greyed out, with a line saying so.

The border under "Artwork" puts an edge around the painting on this slide - a width and a colour. This is the one slide with room around the artwork, so it is the only one a border applies to; the close-ups are cut to fill the frame. The width comes out of the space the painting is given rather than being added around it, so turning it up never pushes the painting down into the logo.

Background

What sits behind the closing slide and the collage slide is set in its own card, which appears when either of those two is picked. Pick a Style - flat colour, or a wash, gradient, radial, grain or vignette drawn from the painting's own palette (or from the background colour, if you tick that box) - and Strength for how strongly it shows.

The vignette adds a second slider, Clear middle: how much of the middle it leaves alone, measured out from the centre towards the nearest edge. Strength sets how dark the ring gets, this sets where it starts, and between them they are the whole of it. It is the same vignette the Post tab draws - an oval the shape of the frame, going to almost black at the edges at full strength - so a reel set up before this will read darker than it did and will want its Strength turned down. The Post tab keeps its own copy of both sliders, as it always has with the background, so setting one tab leaves the other alone.

For a picture behind the art, tick "Use the painting itself as the background", or upload a different photo. An uploaded background belongs to the painting you uploaded it on, so it doesn't turn up behind every other piece you open, and it goes when that painting is deleted. Everything else in the card is shared and saved as your default.

The collage slide sits on this same background, so setting it here covers both frames.

Close-up detail shots

These are the shots that play between the opening and closing slides in the video - each one is a 9:16 crop of the painting itself, no branding over the artwork.

  1. The quickest way in is "Fill the slides for me", under "The slides". It looks at the painting and puts a close-up on each of the strongest parts of it, spread out so no two land on the same place, with the strongest one opening the reel. On a painting with no close-ups yet it fills them straight away; if you already have some it asks before replacing them.
  2. "How many close-ups" under that button is the most it will take, and it is remembered, so you set it once. It is a most rather than a promise: a small, simple painting has only so many places worth a slide of their own, and if it finds four when you asked for eight it takes the four and says so rather than filling up with four more of the same corner. Whether a painting with four is worth a reel at all is your call.
  3. "How close in" is the one thing you can steer: Closer in for brushwork and small passages, Wider for whole parts of the painting, or Mixed, which is some of each and is where it starts. It is a matter of taste rather than of accuracy - there is no correct crop for it to be closer to - so if a set of close-ups is not what you wanted, this is the knob to turn before doing them by hand. It is remembered too.
  4. "Start over" clears every close-up on the painting and puts the reel back to its opening and closing slides with nothing in between. It asks first.
  5. What it gives you is a starting point and nothing is fixed - every crop it makes can be dragged, resized, reordered or dropped exactly like one you drew. It reads the painting's own brushwork, colour and light rather than asking anything of the internet, so it needs no key, works with no connection, and gives the same crops every time you press it on the same painting.
  6. What it is good at is texture and edge - brushwork, pattern, a spoked wheel, lettering, anything busy against something plain. What it does not do is understand what the painting is of, so it can pick a wheel over a face, and it will nearly always miss a signature, which is small and quiet and in a corner. Look at the opening slide first: that is the frame that has to stop somebody scrolling, and it is the one most worth moving by hand if it landed somewhere you would not have chosen.
  7. Or place them yourself. Press "Draw a new crop" - the painting appears, drag the box into place and press Add. Or press "Add by numbers" to add one and set it with sliders. Either way the new close-up becomes the slide on screen, ready to adjust. The painting only shows while you are drawing on it.
  8. Move a close-up on the picture itself. With the opening slide or any detail showing in the preview, drag the painting to slide the crop about - it follows your finger or the mouse the way a photo does - and pinch it, or roll the mouse wheel over it, to go closer in or wider. The sliders move with you, so you can drag it roughly there and then nudge a number if you want it exact.
  9. Pressing a part of the picture still takes you to its settings, as it always has. A press is a press and a drag is a drag: move more than a few pixels and it is understood as moving the crop, and the column stays where it is. On the closing and collage slides there is no crop to move, so the picture behaves exactly as before and a finger scrolls the page as usual.
  10. Each close-up is edited from its own picture in the strip of slides. Pick it and you get its label, Tightness, Across and Down - one shot's sliders at a time, rather than every shot's at once.
  11. "Open the reel on this" makes that shot the opening slide - full bleed with your website line and logo over it - and takes you to it so you can see the change. Which close-up opens the reel can also be changed from a dropdown on the Opening slide.
  12. Drag a close-up along the strip of slides to move it among the slides in between, or use Earlier and Later; the strip shows the running order. Drop removes it and lands you on its neighbour.

Moving close-ups

Any close-up - the opening one or a detail - can move slowly while it is on screen in the video. Pick the slide and choose under Movement: Still, Push in, Pull out or Drift. Still is how every close-up starts, and how every reel built before this played.

The crop you drew is always the widest the slide gets, so a move never shows anything you did not choose. Push in starts on your crop and moves about a fifth closer. Pull out does the opposite: it starts closer and backs away to your crop. Drift keeps the same size and slides slowly across the painting - pick Which way: left to right, right to left, top to bottom or bottom to top. A crop already as wide as the painting goes in a little first so it has room to drift.

Press "Show the move" to watch it once on the preview before building anything. The website line and logo on the opening slide stay still while the painting moves underneath them.

Moves are kept gently slow on purpose. Movement costs the video file more than a still picture does, and every reel has the same size allowance, so a slow move stays sharper. A very tight crop is already enlarged a long way, and moving in on it enlarges it a little more, so it can look softer at the end of a push.

The collage slide

An optional extra frame, sitting among the slides between the opening and the close, carrying several photos at once instead of one. What goes on it are the painting's progress photos - the same ones added on the Paintings tab - so it can show how the piece came together, a set of details, or whatever sequence those photos happen to be. It is the one place in the app those photos are used for anything but your own record.

The slide sits on the same background as the closing slide - the colour, style, and the painting or uploaded photo behind it. The "Background" card shows for both of them, so setting it once covers both frames.

Tick "Include a collage slide" under "The slides" to switch it on, then pick the Collage picture in the strip of slides to set it up. It needs at least two progress photos on the painting before it has anything to show, and it takes up to six. Nothing else changes: the slide is added to the preview switcher, to the exported frames, and to the video, in whichever position you give it.

  1. "Where it comes" sets its place in the running order. Earlier and Later move it up and down the slides in between, from straight after the opening slide to just before the closing one, and a line underneath says where it has landed. It starts off last. The preview switcher, the exported frames and the built video all follow it.
  2. Choose an arrangement - Neat grid lays them out in rows, Stacked column piles them up leaning against each other, Loose collage scatters them either side of the middle. Choosing one places every photo afresh.
  3. The photos are a row of thumbnails. Click one and its Size, Across, Down and Tilt sliders appear underneath - one photo at a time. What you set is kept for that painting alone, so every reel can be arranged differently.
  4. "Lay them out again" puts them all back where the chosen arrangement would have them, for when a slide has been pushed around too far.
  5. Where two photos overlap, the one further along the row sits on top. "Send back" and "Bring forward" change that order. The heading, website line and logo are always drawn over the photos, so nothing can be pushed up underneath and hide them.
  6. Add a heading if the slide wants one - it starts empty, which is photos and nothing else. Border and shadow settings apply to every photo at once, so they read as a set.
  7. The website line and logo are off by default and can be turned on for this slide; both use the size, position and colour set on the Opening slide.
  8. Removing a progress photo on the Paintings tab moves the ones after it up a place, so an arrangement shifts along with them. Lay them out again to tidy it up.
  9. The position is kept per painting, counted as the number of close-ups ahead of it - so dropping or adding a close-up carries the collage slide along rather than losing its place.

The progress flip

The closing slide can open on the painting's progress photos. They flash by one after another, oldest first, in the exact spot where the finished painting sits, and then the finished painting lands. The title, website line, logo and border hold still around them, so it looks like the painting coming together in its frame.

Pick the closing slide and tick "Open on the progress photos" under Progress flip, just below Artwork. It uses the same progress photos as the collage slide, from the Paintings tab, and works with just one. A painting with none simply skips it, with a note saying where to add them.

Speed sets how long each photo stays up, from 0.15 seconds to 1.5 seconds; left is faster. Press "Show the flip" to watch it once on the preview at that speed.

The photos cut rather than blend, because progress photos are taken on different days from slightly different angles, and blending two that do not line up shows the painting sliding about. A photo of a different shape is cropped to fill the painting's frame, so the frame never jumps between photos.

The flip happens inside the closing slide's own time, so it never changes when any other slide plays against the narration. If the closing slide is too short for the speed you chose, the flip goes faster so the finished painting still gets most of the slide.

Building the video

The video is built from the detail shots plus the closing frame, with narration of the painting's story over the top. You have three options:

A silent reel

A narrated reel gets its length from the narration: the app times the slides to fill it, and runs five seconds past the last word so the closing slide isn't cut off mid-sentence. A silent one has no last word, so you set the length yourself - a slider from ten seconds to a minute - and the slides are spread evenly across whatever you choose.

It still records a soundtrack, silent rather than absent. Facebook and Instagram both expect an audio track to be there, and a reel built without one can be refused on upload for no reason you could see.

Once narration is ready, press "Build the mp4". Recording happens in real time - a minute of narration takes a minute. Leave the tab in front while it runs. The slides are timed to fill the narration plus a five-second tail.

"Between slides" in the same card sets how one slide gives way to the next: Dissolve (one melts into the next, the way every reel always has), Fade through black (a short dip to black between them) or Cut (a straight jump). Whichever you pick, each slide still arrives at the same moment against the narration. Tick "Fade up from black at the start and down to black at the end" to open and close the reel on black - but Instagram and Facebook often use the first moment of a reel as its cover picture, so a reel that starts on black can end up with a black cover.

The quality is worked out from how long the reel runs rather than being fixed. What limits a reel is its weight rather than its sharpness - Facebook and the web host both stop at a size - so the app spends the whole allowance either way and every reel comes out at about 24MB whatever its length. Short reels gain the most from this; they used to be squeezed exactly as hard as long ones for no reason.

Loading a reel you built before

Under the Build button is "…or load a reel you built before". Point it at an mp4 you saved and it can go on a timer exactly like a freshly built one.

This is how the same reel reaches Instagram weeks after it went to Facebook. A finished reel is otherwise held in memory only while the tab is open, and the scheduler deletes the video the moment its job posts - so the file you saved is the only copy left, and this is the way back in for it.

It reads the video's length from the file itself, since that is what decides whether Facebook and Instagram will take it. It refuses anything that is not an MP4 and says so as soon as you pick it. And it stays shut until a painting is open, because the captions come from the painting and the post is written into its diary.

Putting the reel on a timer

Underneath the finished video is "Post this reel later". It sends the reel to the scheduler now and posts it at the time you choose, whether this computer is switched on or not - the same thing the Post tab does for a picture. See "Posting on a timer" for how the scheduler works and how to set it up.

It sits under the video rather than anywhere tidier because that is the only place the video exists. It is held in memory while the tab is open and nowhere else, so building another one, or leaving the tab, loses the chance to queue that one.

Tick Facebook Reel, Instagram Reel or both. The captions come from the Story tab on their own, one for each place - if you have not written one, the box says so rather than posting in silence. Pick the day and the time and press Schedule. What goes up is finished at that moment, so building a different reel tomorrow cannot change what Facebook shows on Friday.

With both ticked, a "Space them out" row appears under the date and time: Together, 1 hour, 2 hours or 4 hours, starting at two. Facebook Reel goes first and Instagram Reel follows, and the line underneath names the two real times. The same reel landing in two places in the same second reads as a machine posting - an hour or two apart does not. Choose Together and they go at once, exactly as they used to.

Spaced out, each place is lined up on its own, so either can be cancelled without touching the other. If the second one fails to queue, the app says which one did go up rather than claiming nothing did.

The button only appears once a video has been built and only if the scheduler is set up.

A queued reel shows on the Post tab with the scheduled pictures, and on the Calendar tagged Reel. Cancel it from the Post tab. Once Facebook has been told to publish - which happens a few minutes before it appears - it can no longer be taken back, and the app says so rather than claiming to have cancelled something that then turns up.

Give it longer than a photo. Facebook works through several stages a minute apart: opening the upload, fetching the video, encoding it, publishing it. Five to ten minutes after the time you chose is normal.

Frame export package

If you'd rather build the video in another tool, press "Or just export the frames and script". This downloads a zip containing each frame as a numbered PNG, the story as script.txt, an ffmpeg-ready frames.txt, and a build.txt with step-by-step instructions.

Brand assets

Open the Brand assets card to change the website line, byline, font, logo, and frame colours for the reel. These are separate from the closing-slide layout sliders.

Under it, the Your look card keeps a look to come back to. Press "Keep this look" and every setting on the tab is kept - sizes, positions, colours, the glow, the background style and the rest. After trying something different, "Go back to my kept look" puts them all back, and an Undo beside it returns what you had, in case you went back by mistake. The title and an uploaded background picture belong to each painting, so they are left out. Everything you change is still saved as you go, whichever painting you are on.

"From the art", "Its lightest" and "Its darkest" always mean the painting you have open: choose one for the border, the background, the photo mounts, the glow or the text, and the colour changes to match whenever you open another painting. A colour you pick yourself with the colour box stays exactly as you set it.

The voice id, whether the reel is silent, how long a silent reel runs and the hold on the opening shot are remembered from one visit to the next. The ElevenLabs key is not - it is held only while the tab is open, on purpose.

Text glow

The "Text glow" card puts a soft halo behind the website line, title, and byline on every slide - opening, details, and closing alike. Since the opening and detail slides lay type straight over a close-up of the painting, a glow is often the difference between a website line you can read and one that disappears into the brushwork.

The reel needs an image and at least one detail crop before you can build a video. File a story on the Story tab first - it's what gets narrated.

The rest of the Help

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Connections and setup

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