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You have a static that’s performing, and you want a motion version of it for Reels, Stories, or any placement where movement helps. You don’t need a new shoot, a new concept, or a motion editor. Image-to-video on Melius animates a still in a minute or two — and the agent writes the motion prompt for you. This is one of the most underused workflows on the platform. Marketers who learn it stop opening motion editors for the easy 90% of motion work. Time: 5–10 minutes per clip. You’ll need: the static ad you want to animate.

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The workflow

1

Drop your static onto the canvas

Drag the finished ad in. If it’s already a generated node from earlier work on this canvas, you can use it directly.
2

Create a video node

Right-click → New video node. Seedance 2.0 is the safer default for image-to-video on existing ads (especially anything with people in it); Veo 3.1 is strong for cinematic motion. Match the aspect ratio of your static (1x1, 9x16, 4x5).
3

Pick a duration and resolution

6 seconds is the sweet spot for ad motion — long enough to loop, short enough to render fast. 720p is fine for early iterations; bump to 1080p for production.
4

Use the agent to write the motion prompt

Open a new agent chat on the canvas. Tag the source node with @, and brief the agent. The reliable pattern:
@variation-1: using Seedance, help me animate this image.
1x1 aspect ratio, 720p, 6 seconds.
Keep all of the text in the same spot and keep it static.
Add some light, graceful motion to [the product / the hands / the background]
that loops cleanly.
Specifying what stays still is at least as important as specifying what moves. Without that, the model will animate everything — including the text — and you’ll end up with copy that drifts mid-frame.
5

Watch the agent build the video node

The agent writes a Seedance prompt, connects the source image as the reference, and kicks off the generation. Video runs take longer than image runs — typically 1–3 minutes.
6

Review and tweak

If the motion is right but you want to adjust something (slower, different element moving, looping more cleanly), edit the prompt directly on the video node and re-run. Each re-run saves as a new version on the node, so you can compare without losing the original.

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What “subtle motion” actually means

The mistake is asking for too much movement. Ad motion that converts is usually small:
  • Light parallax on the product. Subtle shift, like the camera is breathing.
  • Loose elements moving. Liquid in a glass, fabric in a breeze, hair, foliage, packaging held by a hand.
  • A single accent loop. A glint, a sparkle, steam, light reflection. One thing moving, everything else still.
  • Text animating in. Letterforms fading or sliding in over the first second, then static.
  • Background shimmer. The subject stays locked; the background subtly shifts color or texture.
The wrong instinct is “make the whole scene move.” That reads as AI-generated and pulls attention away from the product.

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A worked example

A static of a supplement bottle held in two hands against a soft pastel background. The brief to the agent: 
@hero-static: animate this image using Seedance.
1x1, 720p, 6 seconds.
Keep the text, logo, and bottle label exactly where they are.
Add a slow, graceful motion to the hands — a small breathing parallax
as if the model is holding the bottle steady. The background should
have a subtle warm light shift, like soft morning light moving across.
Loop cleanly.
Six seconds of generation later, you have a Reels-ready motion ad that took roughly as long as it took to write the prompt. No motion editor, no keyframes, no exports.

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Why use the agent instead of writing the prompt yourself

Two reasons:
  1. Motion prompts are unintuitive. The vocabulary that gets you good results from Seedance or Veo 3.1 isn’t obvious if you haven’t spent time with these models. The agent has been trained on what works.
  2. You probably don’t know off the top of your head how to phrase the motion you want. You know what you want it to look like. The agent translates that into prompt syntax — “graceful,” “loops cleanly,” “subtle parallax” — that the model will actually follow.
You can still tweak the prompt the agent writes. But starting from the agent’s draft beats starting from a blank field.

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Common pitfalls

  • Animating everything. Tell the agent what stays still, not just what moves. Text especially — it should almost always be static.
  • Too long. A 12-second loop of a static ad with subtle motion gets boring. 6 seconds is right.
  • Resolution too low for production. 720p reads fine on phones; for desktop placements or larger formats, bump to 1080p before shipping.
  • Not specifying the loop. Without “loops cleanly,” the model may end on a different frame than it started — fine for one-shots, jarring as a loop. Always specify.
Captions on motion ads still live outside Melius for now — most teams export the video and add captions in their video editor. Caption tooling is coming with the timeline editor; we’ll update this page when it’s live.
Last modified on May 18, 2026