Reel Pipeline
Turn your Substack or Medium article into a 9:16 AI reel. Local-first, your stack, your GPU.
What it does
Reel Pipeline is the exact 6-stage setup I use to ship a vertical reel from one article in under 10 minutes: paste a Substack or Medium URL, an LLM writes a 3–6 scene screenplay, a TTS voice narrates it, optional AI clips animate the scenes, and ffmpeg composes the final 9:16 MP4 with karaoke captions and your branding.
It runs local-first and every component is swappable. The default config costs $0 — Gemini for the scenario, Kokoro TTS on your CPU, Ken Burns motion over the article's own images. Want studio voice or animated scenes? Plug in ElevenLabs and run Wan 2.2 on your own GPU, or fall back to Replicate at ~$0.30 a scene if you don't have one.
No SaaS subscription, no watermark, no per-video credits, no length cap. You buy it once and own the whole pipeline — render unlimited reels forever. HeyGen Creator alone is $29/month; this is a one-time kit you can fork and bend to your own brand.
Who it's for
- Newsletter writers and indie creators who want reels from posts they already wrote.
- Builders who'd rather own a local pipeline than rent another video SaaS by the month.
- Anyone with a spare GPU (or a Replicate key) who wants studio-ish reels without the studio price.
Coming to Gumroad — one-time $39, $29 early-bird for the newsletter. Distributed as a private repo + a 6-part Substack build series. Building in public.
Get notified
Subscribe to the workshop newsletter — I'll let you know the moment Reel Pipeline is ready to use, plus the build notes along the way.
Part of the workshop
- DripperyLive
Email drip series for indie writers. Plain HTML, no bloat.
- Archive ConciergeLive
An AI librarian for your blog archive. Surfaces the right posts for the right reader.
- Article ForgeInternal
Internal content pipeline I use daily.
- SubhookLive
Inbound email orchestration for writers who outgrew Zapier.
- GrowNoteInternal
Internal hub for my Substack growth sprint — daily Notes mechanics + sprint milestones.