Reelful Turns Photos and Clips Into Finished Reels With AI

Reelful launched a new iOS app that uses AI to turn a user’s camera-roll photos and video clips into finished short-form videos for TikTok, Instagram Reels and similar social platforms.

The app is designed for users who want to publish social videos but do not want to spend time working through traditional editing software. Reelful takes a prompt, selected media and a short voice sample, then produces a video with a script, AI voiceover, captions, music and sound effects.

The startup is currently part of a16z’s Speedrun program. It was founded by Kate Deyneka, a former Snapchat machine learning engineer who worked on video and image models.

Reelful’s workflow starts with the user describing the video they want to make, such as a travel recap, product demo or event highlight. The user then records a 30-second sample for voice cloning and selects photos and clips from their camera roll. From there, Reelful plans the video, writes the narration and assembles the edit.

The app can also convert still photos into AI-generated video clips. If a user uploads a photo of someone cutting a mango, for example, Reelful can animate the scene into a short clip. Those AI-generated outputs include a watermark to show they were created with AI.

After a video is generated, users can keep refining it through chat. Reelful can make changes such as replacing the music, rewriting the script or adjusting parts of the video.

“I want to post more on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, but video editing takes a lot of time, so much time that I do not even want to spend it because I have a lot of things going on in my life, especially now as an early-stage founder,” Deyneka said in an interview with TechCrunch. “I have a lot of events, I meet a lot of interesting people, and this is what I see for all my founder friends: they have a very active life, especially right now when AI is booming, but we do not have time to edit. I see Reelful as a tool that can help people build their online presence and their personal brand.”

Deyneka said the app is initially aimed at founders and business owners who need a steady flow of social content for a personal or company brand. She pointed to examples such as a Bay Area salon that may already have photos and videos of services or customer transformations but lack the time or resources to turn that material into polished posts.

“My target use case is that you went to an event or you met some cool people, and you recorded a short interview with them and while you are driving back home you just uploaded everything to the app, and by the time you’re home, the video is ready,” Deyneka said. “So I want to make it very effortless for people to share their life, their content, their expertise without actively editing or setting up the things on their laptop.”

Reelful is entering a growing market for AI-assisted video tools. The original article names Opus Clip and Captions as other startups changing how users create social content. Reelful’s distinction is that it is built to generate a complete short-form video from raw camera-roll material and a text prompt, rather than only helping edit an existing video.

The app offers one-time video credit bundles and subscriptions. Users can buy five videos for $15, 15 videos for $43 or 33 videos for $90. Monthly plans include Creator at $25 for 10 videos, Pro at $50 for 25 videos and Studio at $100 for 60 videos.

Reelful is available on iOS. Deyneka plans to bring the app to Android and the web in the future.

This analysis is based on reporting from TechCrunch.

Image courtesy of Reelfull.

This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.