talking-head-reel skill

---
name: talking-head-reel
description: Turn a long, messy phone recording of one person talking to camera (every line taken several times, false starts, pauses, "okay, again") into a vertical Instagram / TikTok / Shorts reel, about a minute long, with the best take of each sentence, snap zooms on the cuts, word-timed captions, and animated overlays that amplify what the speaker says (logo chips as they name things, numbers as big callouts, lists that get stamped, a quote card, a typed prompt, polaroids of the other takes, memes, an end card). Use whenever the user hands over a portrait phone recording (IMG_xxxx.MOV) and says "edit this for Instagram", "make a reel", "vertical", "I did a lot of retakes, pick the best parts", "remove the duplicates and pauses", "add animations and zoom in and out", "make it entertaining", or wants a re-cut of a previous reel ("swap the closing take", "change the callout at 0:40", "add music"). Not for landscape walkthroughs with a screen recording.
---

# Talking-head reel

The raw material is one person on a phone, portrait, talking to camera for
five minutes to get ninety seconds of usable speech: every sentence is said
two or three times, the best version is usually the last, and the file ends
with an outtake. The deliverable is a 1080x1920 reel of the best take of
each sentence, cut on word boundaries, with framing snaps on every cut so
the jump cuts read as a style, and overlays that land on the word they
illustrate. Nothing on screen says anything the speaker did not say; it
makes what they said visible.

`assets/Reel.example.tsx` and `assets/reel-segments.example.json` are a
placeholder timeline built on the timings of a fictional recording, so
they compile and show the wiring, the pacing and the density; read them
once before planning a new reel. `overlays.tsx` holds the shared `Card`,
`Big`, `LogoRow` and `Word`; `reel-overlays.tsx` holds the vertical
grammar.

The Remotion project is `remotion/` next to this file (`cd remotion &&
npm install` once). Every path below that says `src/`, `public/` or
`out/` is inside it, and the scripts are run from inside it.

## What "good" looks like

The speaker is centred and fills the width. Under the chin, a band of dark
cards that change every few seconds: a row of logo chips popping one per
spoken name, a big number, a numbered list that fills in as things are
listed and then gets a red stamp slammed across it when they are
dismissed, a quote card whose last line lands in the accent colour, a
claim struck through, a terminal typing a prompt, three polaroids of the
other takes, two big logos bouncing at the close. Next to the head,
top-right on the wall, a "reaction slot": a logo that appears big and
alone on its name and is gone a second later, a big background-free emoji
on a feeling, a meme popping in on a punchline. Under the band, three-word
captions with the spoken word in the accent colour. The framing snaps
between 1.0 and 1.1 at every cut and at most sentence starts, and pushes
in slowly on the line that matters. The last frame freezes under an end
card with the thing the speaker wants people to click. All of it above
the Instagram UI.