From signing up to publishing on your own domain. The reference sections — 6 transitions and 21 themes — are generated from the product itself, so they are never out of date.
Step one
Getting started
A workspace holds everything you make. Sign up and you get one, along with a sample story on real footage — it is there to be pulled apart, and nothing about it is public.
2A guided tour runs once on your first visit to the dashboard. It rings each control as it explains it — skip it any time, and it will not come back.
3Open My first story from the dashboard. That is the sample.
4Select a beat, change its title, and watch the preview. That round trip is the whole editing loop.
Workspaces and people
Projects, footage and members all belong to a workspace. Invite people from Settings → Members with one of four roles.
Role
Can do
Owner
Everything, including billing and removing the workspace
Admin
Everything except owner-only actions; can manage members
Editor
Create and edit projects, upload footage, publish
Viewer
Read only
Invitations are claimed the first time the person signs in with that address, so you can invite somebody before they have an account.
Footage
Zoetropes
A zoetrope is your footage, cut into gapless sections that a story scrubs as the visitor scrolls. Named for the pre-cinema device that made motion out of sequential images.
It belongs to the workspace, not to a project, because footage is expensive to process and worth reusing.
Upload footage
1Go to Zoetropes and choose a file: a video or GIF (mp4, quicktime, webm, x-matroska, x-msvideo, mpeg, gif, jpeg, png, webp, avif), or an ordered set of images. Stills become the same kind of sequence through the same pipeline.
2Give it a name. This is required: a workspace list of untitled sequences is unusable after the third one.
3Pick a frame rate between 1 and 30. Higher is smoother and heavier; 1 to 12 suits slow, deliberate scrolling, 24 to 30 suits motion.
4Upload. Progress is live, and it survives a page reload — the work is on the server, not in your tab.
Length limit
Clips are capped at 30 seconds. The check runs on the real file after upload, so trimming beforehand saves you the wait.
While it processes, and when it fails
The clip is cut into gapless sections — one continuous take, so each section starts exactly where the last ended.
Cancel at any point. The job stops at the next section rather than finishing quietly in the background.
A failed clip tells you why — unsupported codec, no video stream, a broken container — rather than only that it failed.
Retry after a failure or a cancellation without re-uploading.
Creating
Making a story
A project is one story with its own address: a cover, one or more pages of footage with words over it, and a last page.
From footage to a first draft
1Choose New project on the dashboard and name it. The web address is suggested from the name.
2Upload footage, or pick footage the workspace already has.
3Say what it is: a Film (one video, one continuous page) or a Book (frames from a video or your own images, one frame per screen, one page or several, in a direction you choose). Topic, audience and tone are optional.
4Press Create. On paid plans the draft is written from what is actually in your footage; on the free plan you get a structured draft with one beat per section, ready for your words.
5The editor opens on the draft. Nothing is public yet.
What leaves our servers
The AI draft sends your footage to our model provider for that one request, and only when you press Create on a plan that includes it. The privacy policy has the details.
Editing
The story editor
Three panes: the outline on the left, the story as visitors see it in the middle, and the settings for whatever you selected on the right. On a phone they become tabs.
Pages and beats
The first page is always /. Others live at their address: chapter-2 becomes /chapter-2.
A beat is one moment: a section of the page's footage with its own words, motion and transition into the next beat.
Drag beats to reorder them, within a page or onto another page. The arrow buttons do the same from the keyboard.
Two beats may play over the same section — a long shot with two captions.
Selecting a beat scrolls the preview to it.
What you can change
Selected
Settings
Beat
Words or one component, its position and text size, the footage section (Film) or frame (Book), how the words arrive, the transition into the next beat and its strength, length in screens of scrolling, how long the camera settles, its own fonts, and — in a Book — captions and speech.
Page
Title, address, footage (a Book page can use images instead, in an order you set), the transition in from the previous page, fonts, search title and description, and a visitor password.
Story
Film or Book, a Book's direction, theme, story fonts, and every scroll setting: default beat length, seam overlap, top bar, section rail, scroll hint, holding the last frame and fading out at the end.
Cover and last page
Title, subtitle, byline and cover image; closing line, up to two links, a share button, and the footage credits.
Saving and undo
Everything saves a moment after you stop. Undo and redo cover every change, and typing into one field counts as one step. The preview shows the saved story, so it refreshes when a save lands.
Reference
Kinds and transitions · 6
Every transition is driven by the scroll, never by a timer: a page half-way across a seam is half-turned, and scrolling back turns it back. They work between beats and between pages. Reduced-motion settings turn every one into a plain dissolve.
Kind of story
What it is
Film
One continuous page. Video moves smoothly as the visitor scrolls, with words and components over each scene.
Book
A frame-by-frame story made from video frames or images. Each screen shows one frame, and pages are navigated with Previous and Next.
Transition
What happens as you scroll across the seam
Vertical
The next scene dissolves in as the words rise.
Horizontal
Scenes slide sideways, like walking from room to room.
Book
The page turns about its spine as you scroll.
Pagination
One clean step per scene, like flipping a page.
Crossfade
A straight dissolve between scenes.
Cut
A hard cut at the middle of the seam.
Each beat’s words can arrive as Fade, Slide up, Slide from right, Slide from left, Scale, Blur in, Cinematic or None, driven by the scroll like everything else.
Look
Themes and fonts · 21
A theme sets the paper, ink, accent, corner rounding and the two faces a story uses. Fonts can be changed for the whole story, one page, or one beat — the nearest one wins.
Fonts
Pick from a curated list of typefaces. There is no free-text font field: a typo would silently fall back to a system font.
Fonts are served from our own servers, so a visitor's browser never contacts a third-party font host.
The themes
Each card is drawn in that theme’s own colours and faces.
EditorialMagazine voice. Warm cream, Inter Tight 800, Playfair italic emphasis, coral.BeginInter Tight · Inter
CarnivalLoud maximalist editorial. Tinted cream, Big Shoulders, duo-tone drops, hard shadows.BeginBig Shoulders Display · DM Sans
CobaltDev-tool register. Cool engineered white, Space Grotesk, one cobalt signal, code hero.BeginSpace Grotesk · Inter
GridSwiss systems. Exposed column grid, lowercase Archivo 800, one signal ink.BeginArchivo · Archivo
HumPlayful and alive. Cream, rounded Plus Jakarta Sans, pear-yellow, cyan and coral pops.BeginPlus Jakarta Sans · Plus Jakarta Sans
LumenPremium AI-tool. Violet night foundry (or bone day), lowercase Instrument Serif, molten brass.BeginInstrument Serif · Geist
Going live
Publishing
Nothing is public until you publish it. Your draft is yours alone until then, whatever the editor says about saving.
Publish, and go back
Each publish writes a version: the whole story, exactly as it was.
Restoring an old version brings it back as your DRAFT. Putting it live is a second, deliberate step — losing a week of work to one click is not a feature.
The editor and the project page tell you which version is live.
Preview any version at its own URL without touching the live site.
Password-protected pages
Any page can ask for a password first. It is one shared password per page, not visitor accounts — right for a client preview or an unlisted deck.
Set or change it in the page settings in the editor. It is never shown again after you save it.
Changing the password immediately locks everyone who had the old one back out.
A gated page is left out of your sitemap and asks search engines not to index it.
Restoring an old version never unlocks a page.
Your address
Custom domains
Every project gets a free address at your-project.{root}. Connect your own when you are ready.
Connecting one
1Add the hostname under the project’s Domains page.
2Publish the TXT record we show you. This proves you control the name — a CNAME alone proves nothing, so without it anyone could claim any domain.
3Add the CNAME (or the A record, for an apex like example.com — apex names cannot carry a CNAME).
4Press Verify. HTTPS is arranged automatically once it resolves.
More than one name
A project can hold several hostnames but has one primary. Links, social previews, robots and the sitemap all use the primary, and the others can redirect to it — two names each calling themselves canonical splits your search ranking between them.
Visitors
Analytics
What we count
Page views and clicks, per page and per link, with internal and external links separated.
A rough visitor location from network-level headers. No third-party tracker is loaded unless you add your own.
Visitor IP addresses are salted and hashed the moment they arrive, so returning visitors can be counted without anything identifying being stored.
Help
When something is wrong
What you see
What it usually is
The upload failed straight away
The file is not video, GIF or an image set, or it is over the size limit. Both are checked on the real file, not on what the browser claims.
Processing failed
The card shows the reason from the encoder. An unsupported codec or a truncated file are the common ones — re-export as MP4 and retry.
A beat is missing from the page
It points at a section the footage does not have — usually after changing the page's footage. Pick a section for it in the editor.
A page shows no film
It has no footage selected, or its footage was processed long ago and needs uploading again. The preview says which.
My changes are not on the live site
Saved is not published. Press Publish in the editor or on the project page.
The domain will not verify
DNS takes time to spread. Confirm the TXT record is on the exact name we showed, then try again in a few minutes.
A page asks me for a password
Somebody protected it. The password is not recoverable — set a new one from the page settings in the editor.
Still stuck? Write to support@storiefied.com with your workspace name and, if a site is involved, its address.