shipreel

Reviewing a massive diff is a high-cognitive load task that often leads to shallow approvals. Shipreel reduces this friction by generating 150-second narrated walkthrough videos directly from your pull request data, combining animated diagrams, code snippets, and UI recordings.

What it does

• Automated narration converts PR descriptions and diffs into a concise, spoken script using local system voices.
• Animated visuals generates SVG-based diagrams, code panels, and labels to explain backend logic and architectural changes.
• UI recording orchestrates headless browser sessions to capture real application flows for frontend changes.
• Scene orchestration builds a multi-scene MP4 with crossfades, ambient music, and synchronized captions.
• GitHub optimization targets specific file sizes to ensure the output fits within the 10MB limit for direct PR attachments.

How it works

1. Analyze the PR by fetching the diff and metadata via the GitHub CLI to identify the core changes.
2. Draft the story by selecting 4 to 7 key scenes that focus on the "why" and "how" rather than a file-by-file tour.
3. Generate the scenes using a JavaScript-based engine that produces SVG animations and records optional UI clips.
4. Render the video locally using FFmpeg to combine audio, video, and transitions into a final MP4 file.

Frameworks & tools

Built for Node.js environments utilizing the GitHub CLI (gh), FFmpeg, and Chrome. The engine uses a custom library for SVG generation and Puppeteer for headless UI recording.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Writing a script, drawing diagrams, and recording your screen manually takes hours per PR. This skill automates the entire production pipeline, ensuring consistent timing, professional pacing, and local execution with no recurring API costs for video generation.

Use cases

• Explain complex refactors where the diff alone doesn't show the new architectural flow.
• Showcase new UI features to stakeholders before they pull the branch locally.
• Onboard new team members to a codebase by providing a library of video-documented changes.
• Highlight specific areas in a large PR that require extra scrutiny from senior reviewers.

Known limitations

Requires local installations of Chrome and FFmpeg. Narration quality depends on the host system's text-to-speech engine unless configured for external services. Video uploads to GitHub must be done manually via the web interface.