Faux Reel
A sizzle reel with no video in it. Stills, cut fast enough to read as motion.TL;DR Built→ In a day, with Claude CodeShips→ React component, a 4.8KB web component, and a GIF/MP4 exporterTry it→ Section 01 takes your own images. Nothing uploads, nothing saves
Field Product Motion
Author Jeremy Prasatik Published: 2026 Status: Tool
Classification Motion Front-End Tooling
Abstract
A sizzle reel is usually footage: shot, edited, rendered, hosted. Faux Reel skips the footage and keeps the edit. It runs a stack of still photographs through fourteen transition types, wipes, blinks, a burn, a lens pinch, and a title card that assembles itself, all on a timer tuned so the eye reads motion. One container, CSS animation, zero video files.
I wanted that look, just not the editing behind it. So I had the code do it instead. The build took a day with Claude Code, most of it spent finessing the timing and the transitions, getting each cut to land so the stills feel like motion and not a slideshow. The finished web component weighs 4.8KB gzipped, smaller than any one of the photographs it plays.
None of this is a screenshot or a mockup. The reel up top is running live, and the lab below it is where you load your own photos: it pulls a five-color palette out of them and rebuilds the reel to match. If you want a file instead of a live embed, the same code exports the whole thing as a looping GIF or an MP4.
Load your own.
The default cut is seven frames, one from each of my projects. Drop in up to eight of your own and it rebuilds around them. Each beat gets a chip below. Click one to freeze the reel on it.The highlighted chip is the current beat. Click one to freeze it.
Faux Reel
LabLoad stills, pull a palette from their pixels, set a title. The reel cuts itself. Nothing uploads, nothing saves.
01—Images
Running the studio set
Up to 8. They stay in your browser — a refresh clears them.
02—Palette
03—Title card
1–2 words slide in. 3+ scatter through the cut, then build.
04—Speed × 1.00
05—Ratio
Square and portrait for social, 9:16 for stories.
Why stills read as motion.
The trick is hiding the cut. When the reel blinks a color frame or the lens pinches shut, the photo swaps behind the cover, so you never see the switch. Every cut has to land on a new image, or the blink reads as a glitch. Titles cut in hard instead of fading, and each frame holds for a beat before the next one.14
Transition types
Wipes, blinks, burn, pinch, and four kinds of type
4.8KB
Web component
Gzipped, zero dependencies, any webpage
20fps
Deterministic export
131 frames stepped on a frozen clock
0
Video files
1.3MB as GIF, 0.2MB as MP4, nothing hosted
Services
Product Design
Engineering
Stack
React
TypeScript
CSS
Playwright
Links
The reel on this page is the deliverable, running where it was made, cut from seven of the projects around it. It is also on GitHub, MIT-licensed. A developer or product manager who needs a deck or a portfolio to move can grab it and skip the shoot.
