Today I'm speaking with Jonny Burger, the creator and founder of Remotion, a framework for making videos programmatically with React. In other words, making videos with code.

I reached out to Jonny a few weeks ago to book this interview. Two days later, Remotion went viral in the Claude ecosystem when they released agent skills. Almost overnight, Remotion had thousands of non-coders prompting videos into existence. They went from a fairly niche developer framework to suddenly having three-quarters of their users be non-technical people one-shotting videos with AI. For someone deeply interested in agentic video, it's one of the clearest real-world examples of early agentic video becoming practical.

We go back to the beginning: Jonny's original intention with Remotion, the first use cases, and how it's evolved over five years. We cover the stack (React, headless Chromium, FFmpeg), source-available vs open source licensing, and why Remotion focuses on being composable with other tools rather than building a full After Effects replacement. We also dig into the Claude skills wave, what's needed for AI to understand motion better, the Lottie and Rive integrations, and where Jonny sees Remotion in five years.

Topics Discussed

The original idea: decomposing motion graphics into code, version control for video
First iteration: rotating React logo, animating electrons, mobile app developer roots
What Remotion is: React + useCurrentFrame, headless browser, FFmpeg pipeline
Early adopters: React experts who wanted to do everything with React
Data-driven videos: turning 1000 rows into 1000 videos
Source-available licensing and sustainability (companies need a commercial license)
What Remotion provides vs what you'd build: engine and rendering, not UI
Adobe using Remotion for Adobe Podcast
Composing with other tools: Mapbox, Lottie, exporting overlays to After Effects
Strengths: web-renderable content, APIs, complex logic. Weaknesses: shader-based effects
The viral Claude wave and skills: sparse prompts, one-shot video generation
What skills add: duration, transitions, timing options, specific effects, voiceover
Visual controls: sliders that write back to code
Teaching AI motion: fundamentals over examples, context size constraints
Lottie integration: After Effects to web, losing information in translation
Rive integration: design in Rive, parametrize in Remotion
Five-year vision: many small building blocks, WebCodecs/WebGPU/WebFS, betting on models improving
Three failure categories: technical mistakes, creativity (subjective), overwhelming the AI

People Mentioned

Igor (Remotion) co-founder
Mehmet Ademi (Remotion) co-founder
Shankar Deep early contributor, built the player component
Steve Ruiz (tldraw) on betting on models improving

Tools Mentioned

Remotion programmatic video in React
MoviePy Python-based programmatic video (no live preview)
Manim math animation engine
FFmpeg video encoding
Lottie After Effects to web translation layer
Rive interactive animation, Duolingo/Spotify
ElevenLabs voiceover generation
Vercel Remotion rendering solution (just launched)
Adobe Podcast uses Remotion
Fable browser-based After Effects replacement (closed)