Image: GitHub
Why it mattersA marketer can get a short-form story video from a prompt. The look is pinned to 1,200 reference frames the author measured.
A new Claude Code skill is getting a lot of attention this week. It makes short animated story videos the way a studio would. mromidev pushed Claude Animated Shorts to GitHub on 1 November 2026. By 3 November 2026 it had 797 stars, 188 forks and 24 watchers. It ranked 24 on Trendshift's daily list of trending projects. The code is MIT.
What it makes
Claude Animated Shorts outputs a 55 to 70 second vertical video. The shape is the one viewers scroll past on a phone. Characters are 2D, drawn with ink outlines. The world around them is in 3D, with a painted town, lens blur and gliding cameras. A march score and sound effects are mixed in. The repository includes a worked example called The Bridge That Fell for a Song. It is a 67 second short about the Broughton bridge collapse of 1831.
The engine is three.js running inside Remotion. Both run on the writer's own computer. There is no text-to-video model in the pipeline. The author's point is simple. Every frame is drawn by code. Nothing is sampled from a model that may draw a different face from one shot to the next.
How Claude Code drives it
The skill is a SKILL.md file in the repository, plus templates. In Claude Code, the writer says "Use the cartoon short skill and make a short about ...". Claude then runs the full pipeline. It gathers the topic and facts. It drafts a script. It picks a voice. It writes a shot plan in a file called story.ts. It renders stills. Then it produces the final 2K video and sound mix. Agents also check each frame against the project's reference frames and reports.
The look is measured against 20 reference shorts
The repository has one feature a text-to-video pipeline does not: a style bible. mromidev measured the look of 20 reference shorts. The result is seven numbered reports. They cover motion, depth, textures, characters, lighting, outlines and the colour grade. The repository also checks in 38 full-size reference frames. Each is 540 by 960 pixels. There are also 20 contact sheets of 60 frames each. That is 1,200 reference frames in total.
The style bible is what makes the look repeatable. Two shorts made with this skill should look like they belong to the same brand.
What it costs to run
The toolchain is Remotion with the @remotion/three package, plus Node, Python 3 and ffmpeg. The repository warns about disk use. Every Remotion bundle copies the project's public/ folder, about 1.3 GB, into a temp folder. The author tells you to point REMOTION_TMP at a drive with space.
The repository is two days old. That is the usual early-stage caveat: one author, few forks, no release tags yet. A team trying it today should pin to the current commit. Keep your own copy of the templates. The author also asks writers to supply their own story, characters and voice. The references are a style guide, and that is their only job.
For creators and marketing teams
The practical reader is a founder, a marketer or a creator. They want a short on their own topic, in a repeatable look. Claude Animated Shorts gives them a working pipeline. The setup takes about an hour. The one short in the repository is the proof.
Source
mromidev, claude-animated-shorts repository, GitHub. The star count and trending position are from Trendshift's daily ranking.
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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