How to make vertical videos for TikTok, Reels and Shorts

Choose the frame before anything is generated, and you get a real vertical video — not a landscape one letterboxed into a strip. Here is how the shape, the captions and the cost actually work.

Made with the app, in the format this guide is about: 9:16, captions lifted clear of the platform’s own buttons.

Pick the frame before you generate, not after

The single thing that separates a vertical video that works from one that does not is choosing the shape up front. A 16:9 video posted as a Short or a Reel gets letterboxed — black bars top and bottom, your subject shrunk into a strip in the middle. Cropping it afterwards cuts the sides off every shot.

So the frame is a choice you make before anything is generated:

Every scene is composed at that shape from the start. Stock footage that does not match is filled rather than letterboxed — the clip sits over a blurred, cover-cropped copy of itself, the convention every vertical-video app uses, instead of stranding a thin strip in black.

Captions sit higher in vertical, on purpose

TikTok, Reels and Shorts all put their own interface along the bottom of the screen — the caption, the handle, the buttons. Subtitles positioned for landscape end up underneath all of it. In 9:16 the burned-in captions are raised so the platform's own furniture does not cover them.

This matters more than it sounds: most short-form video is watched muted. If the captions are hidden, the video says nothing.

Making one

1. Type a topic, or paste a script if you already have the words.
2. Set Frame to Shorts, TikTok, Reels · 9:16.
3. Pick where the pictures come from — free stock footage, free stock images, or AI stills generated on your own connected Pollen.
4. Choose a length. Around 40 words of narration is roughly 30 seconds.
5. Generate, then review it scene by scene before anything is published.

Cut it down without regenerating anything

Short-form punishes slow openings. Every scene is stored separately, so dropping the weak ones is a re-stitch of clips that already exist: it takes seconds, costs nothing, regenerates nothing, and you can put a scene back afterwards if you change your mind.

That means the honest workflow for vertical is: generate a little long, watch it once, drop the two scenes that drag, re-cut. No timeline, no re-render, no extra spend.

What a vertical video costs

The frame itself is free. What decides cost is where the pictures come from:

• Free stock footage and free stock images — real media, unlimited, no Pollen spent, no subscription.
• AI stills — one generation per scene, on your own connected Pollinations account, so you control the spend.

You can also set a daily limit on AI generations that falls back to free stock once it is reached, so a runaway series cannot empty your balance.

Next: turn a script you have already written into a video, or ask Claude to make it for you.