12 compositions, one render command
Ad1–Ad12 registered in a single root, each 1080×1920 @ 30fps, ~360–450 frames, rendered to separate MP4s via remotion render.
← INDEX/WORK/CRUISE-REELS
№ 11 — PROGRAMMATIC VIDEO
Cruise Reels
Twelve ad variants. One codebase. Zero timelines dragged around an editor.
THESIS
Why this exists
Short-form ad creative dies by iteration cost: every variant is another afternoon in a video editor. Cruise Reels treats the ad as software — twelve 1080×1920 vertical compositions written in React, rendered to H.264 by CLI, each 12–15 seconds of parameterized scenes over stock cruise footage.
Fifteen years of running paid media taught me what the creative needs to say; Remotion let me encode it once and render it twelve ways.
THE BUILD
What I engineered
A shared motion vocabulary
Reusable FootageBackdrop (full-bleed OffthreadVideo with configurable legibility gradients), a Caption component with an inline accent-word mini-parser, spring-pulsed CTA buttons, and phone/text response rows.
Frame-driven animation
Everything keyed to useCurrentFrame — spring() entrances, staggered thumbnail fly-ins, interpolated easings — deterministic, reviewable, diffable motion.
Centralized art direction
One coral/gold/navy/cream palette and shared shadow constants keep twelve ads reading as one campaign.
SCREENS
In the wild
SIGNALS
12AD COMPOSITIONS
1080×1920@ 30FPS VERTICAL
~5.9kLINES OF TSX
STACK
Remotion 4React 19TypeScriptspring() physicsOffthreadVideoH.264 render pipeline
WHAT IT PROVES
The marketer and the engineer in one workflow: ad creative that scales like software, informed by a decade and a half of actually buying the media it’s made for.