mromidev/claude-animated-shorts

What it is

This is a Claude Code skill for producing 55–70 second animated story shorts on a local machine. The output is a vertical video that combines simple 2D characters with a colorful 3D world, complete with ink outlines, painted sets, lens blur, gliding camera moves, a march-style score, and sound effects. Rendering runs through three.js inside Remotion, so no text-to-video AI service is involved.

The repository ships the skill instructions (SKILL.md), a complete short film project as a template, synthesized audio, QA scripts, and a large reference library of measured style guides, reports, frames, and contact sheets. The author reports using the pipeline to make the 67-second short The Bridge That Fell for a Song. It suits creators who already work with Claude Code and want a repeatable look for faceless vertical stories on their own hardware.

Getting started

The workflow assumes a working Remotion setup with the @remotion/three package, plus Node, Python 3, and ffmpeg. Before installing, confirm that these are available on your machine.

1. Place the project folder at ~/.claude/skills/cartoon-3d-short/, either by cloning the repository into that path or downloading the ZIP and copying it.
2. Make sure Remotion and its three.js integration are installed in your Remotion project.
3. Point REMOTION_TMP at a directory on a large drive. Each Remotion bundle copies public/ (around 1.3 GB), so a small temp partition will fill up.
4. In Claude Code, ask for the skill and provide a topic, for example: Use the cartoon short skill and make a short about ….

From there, the model follows SKILL.md: it works through the topic and facts, script, voice, and shot plan in story.ts, then renders stills for review and compares them against the published frames and reports. The finished output is a 2K render plus a sound mix. The README does not specify exact Remotion commands or the expected render duration, so the skill instructions and the bundled template are the places to look for those details.

Constraints and content rules

The pipeline runs locally and depends on a fairly heavy toolchain rather than a hosted generator. Disk space is the most visible constraint because of the large public/ assets, and the QA loop works by comparing generated frames against the provided references.

On content, the author asks users to supply their own story, characters, and voice, and to use the reference material for visual style only, not as content to copy. The code and docs are MIT-licensed; the reference frames are included for style study and fall outside that license. Since the skill instructs Claude to set art direction and produce assets, users are responsible for the factual accuracy of the story and for the licensing of any music or voice they add.

HotRepo's take

The repository appeared on HotRepo's new-project TypeScript list on 2026-11-01, in a snapshot taken within its first day, with 108 stars and 34 forks gained over roughly ten hours. That early signal reflects interest in the skill format and the rendered style rather than broad production validation. The design decision to keep footage generation in local three.js/Remotion code, with an unusually thorough reference and measurement library for agent-assisted QA, is the substantive differentiator; the README's evidence for quality is a single named short, so treat the starred count as attention, not a quality measure.

Project source and documentation