HeyFake now turns fake chats into videos

Fake-chat screenshots have one structural weakness as content: they are static. A storytime creator on TikTok doesn't want a frame, they want the conversation to happen — the pause before a reply, the typing dots, the message landing. For two years creators using HeyFake solved that by exporting a stack of screenshots and stitching them in a video editor, faking the motion frame by frame.

That's the workflow video mode replaces. Instead of exporting nine screenshots and animating them by hand, you build the conversation once and the render does the motion for you. The chat itself is unchanged — it's the same fake WhatsApp chat you already know — but now there's a Video tab next to the screenshot one.

The output is an MP4 sized for vertical video. Inside it, three things are doing the work that used to take a manual editing pass:

The animated keyboard. "Me" messages don't pop in — they type out character by character into the input bar, with an iOS or Gboard keyboard, and the chat lifts as the keyboard slides up. This is the detail that makes the difference between a real-looking text video and an obvious slideshow.

Per-message timing. Every message carries its own delay and an optional typing bubble before it. A reply that lands after a long, visible pause reads completely differently from one that snaps back instantly — and you set that beat by beat in the timing accordion.

The same chrome as the screenshot. Tick colours, the iMessage "Read" indicator, dark mode, contact name and avatar, status-bar time — every screenshot detail still applies and the video inherits all of it. Nothing looks different just because it's moving.

The flow is deliberately close to making a screenshot — if you can build a fake chat, you can build a video. Open the Studio in video mode, pick WhatsApp or iMessage, and type your conversation. Then switch to the Video tab, set the speed and per-message pacing, watch the preview loop, and hit render. The MP4 comes back in the panel and a link goes to your inbox.

The full step-by-step is in the fake text message video hub page, which also covers what kind of content the format suits.

Video mode ships with limits we're honest about. Free accounts get 2 renders per day, and each clip can run up to 20 seconds. Rendering video is compute-heavy in a way that generating a PNG simply isn't, so the limit is there to keep the beta stable while we learn. It will be revisited.

More importantly: it only works on two generators today — WhatsApp and iMessage chats. The architecture underneath is generator-agnostic, so more are coming, but we'd rather ship two that feel right than ten that feel rushed.

This is where you come in. After every render you can rate it, and a low rating opens a comment box. We read those. The roadmap for which generator gets video next, and which rough edges get smoothed first, is going to be shaped directly by what beta users tell us. If something feels off, the most useful thing you can do is say so in that box.

The near-term plan is more generators in video mode, longer clips as the render pipeline proves stable, and tighter controls over pacing and transitions. Saved projects already exist — a chat you build is a reusable project you can reopen and re-render — so iterating on a video is no longer a from-scratch job.

If you've previously built fake chats with HeyFake, the fastest way to understand video mode is to take a conversation you already like and render it. The same-conversation-five-apps experiment is a good source of test material.