🧩 Interview, Generate Your Skill, and Make Your First Reel
With the stack ready, this is where the magic happens: the 8-block interview designs your identity, the engine is copied, and out comes your child skill. At the end, one command runs your first reel—and you learn how it degrades gracefully if any extra is missing.
How to use it in 2 commands (summary)
The entire editor boils down to two sentences typed into Claude Code. The rest of this module explains each one.
forja meu editor de reelsonce: you answer the interview, and the skill generates YOUR reel-edita-<marca>.
reel edita ~/videos/gravacao-bruta.mp4every time: provide the path to the vertical raw footage; it cuts, suggests the treatment, assembles, and delivers.
🎙️ The 8-block interview
As soon as you activate Forja Reel, it starts a interview organized into 8 blocks. Each block covers one part of your editing identity. In the end, all the answers become the half that is only yours — the one that adds to the shared engine.
What you type to get started (just once):
forja meu editor de reelsEquivalent alternatives: /forja-reel or monta meu reel-edita. The skill responds with the first question from the 8 blocks.
Content type and channel.
Full screen, PiP, faceless…
Colors, typography, branding.
Faster-paced or more relaxed.
Real, generic, how much to use.
Caption and chip style.
Format, resolution, duration.
How much you want to review.
A conversation in 8 blocks that shapes your editing identity.
These answers become your half of the child skill.
Interview, 8 blocks, identity.
✅ One decision at a time, always with a recommendation
The interview doesn’t bombard you: it asks one thing at a time, in clear language, and always suggests a recommendation. You can accept the default, adjust it, or ask for an explanation. At the end, everything is consolidated into a file — the perfil.json.
New here? — “perfil.json”
It’s a small text file that neatly stores all your interview choices. It is the source of your identity: you can save, version, and reuse it when generating the skill.
💬 What a question looks like in practice
"Do you prefer a more agile (quick cuts, lots of movement) or more with breathing room (longer shots, breathing room between ideas)? I recommend agile for short social media content." — you can simply respond quickly/with breathing room, or accept the suggestion.
Why learn: you make decisions without getting lost, even if you don’t know the jargon. Key concepts: guided decision, recommendation, perfil.json.
🩺 Environment Diagnostics (Opt-In)
Knowing your profile, the skill creates a environment diagnostics: checks what’s already on your machine and proposes installing it only what your profile needs. Nothing unnecessarily heavy, and nothing paid without your "yes".
✓ What it does
- ✓Check FFmpeg, Hyperframes, Groq
- ✓Suggests only what's missing for your profile
- ✓Asks for confirmation before anything paid
✗ What it avoids
- ✗Install extras you won’t use
- ✗Connect a paid service on your own
- ✗Leave you in the dark about what changed
💡 Why “opt-in” matters: you stay in control. You can start with just the essentials (FFmpeg + Hyperframes) and add the extras later when it makes sense. Key concepts: diagnostics, opt-in, minimal dependencies.
🧬 Generate the Child Skill reel-edita-<marca>
This is the moment when the meta-skill fulfills its role: it copies the engine (the technical part, tested and shared) and combines your generated identity (of the perfil.json). The result is a new skill, just for you: reel-edita-<marca> — o your editor.
perfil.json) plus the shared engine (purple) generate the child skill on the right. Change the profile and you get a different editor — the engine is the same.Important detail — normalization
The child skill comes out clean and technical: it carries your name/brand, with no traces of any third-party origin. It’s your tool, presented as technical.
Key concepts: child skill, engine + identity, generation.
🎬 Run Your First Reel
With the child skill ready, editing takes one sentence. You call reel edita followed by the path to your raw video, and the engine does the rest—deterministic cutting, assembly, captions, SFX, and review in a loop until it passes.
Objective: make your first reel from an MP4. Replace the section between < > using your file’s actual path.
reel edita <caminho-do-seu-video.mp4>Example using a real path:
reel edita ~/videos/gravacao-bruta.mp4How to verify
It answers showing the clean cut for you to approve and suggesting 2-3 treatments; then builds it, runs the reviewer in a loop until it passes, and points out the generated reel file (a vertical MP4). Open it and check: clean speech, pacing without gaps, captions at the right height.
Key concepts: reel edits, file path, first render.
🛟 Fail Gracefully
Not everyone will turn on all the extras—and that’s fine. An important quality of the skill is degrade gracefully: if an optional item is missing, it doesn’t block the process; it chooses a backup plan and delivers anyway.
Without fal.ai
The cold open comes out without an AI-generated image — uses a simpler visual element, but still makes an impact.
Without Firecrawl
Without real website captures, it uses another supporting element for the B-roll instead of leaving a gap.
Without Groq
Transcription/review falls back to another option; caption quality may vary a little, but the reel gets made.
🔑 The rule
Start with the essentials (FFmpeg + Hyperframes) and add the extras whenever you want. You never get stuck waiting until you have “everything”—you can always generate something.
Key concepts: graceful degradation, fallback, essentials first.
Self-recovery (optional): what generates your child skill reel-edita-<marca>?
✅ Module summary
Next track:
Track 4 — Practical examples: the 6 recipes, the cold open, and a real end-to-end workflow with QC.