win4r/video-director

What it does

video-director is a Claude Code skill for making short videos as code rather than through a video editor. The target formats include HTML, Canvas, SVG, Three.js, GSAP and Remotion, rendered frame by frame to MP4. It is aimed at launch films, promos, explainers, data stories, kinetic type, loops and social reels.

The skill is intended to work primarily with Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code. It supplies a directing stance, per-film settings such as clock, continuity, register and text policy, 13 principles, a build contract, a brief structure and a definition of done. It also includes reference templates and craft numbers, plus two QA scripts. The repository deliberately does not ship a shot library to copy.

Install and run

The official setup assumes Claude Code with Claude Opus 5.5 selected. Clone the repository and copy the inner skill folder into your personal skills directory:

git clone https://github.com/win4r/video-director.git
cp -R video-director/video-director ~/.claude/skills/

For the Claude apps, the README says to zip the inner video-director/ folder and upload it as a custom skill install steps.

The scripts require ffmpeg/ffprobe and Python 3 with numpy and Pillow. Rendering HTML films needs Node with Playwright and Chromium, or Remotion can be used instead. faster-whisper is optional for narration checks, and any text-to-speech tool can supply voice.

Once installed, give the agent a plain-language brief, for example a 15-second looping launch video, a 30-second narrated explainer at 16:9, or a 20-second Reel built from a CSV. The skill is designed to plan the film, write the animation code, render it and revise defects.

The QA scripts can also be run directly. check_timeline.py validates a timeline plan before code is written, while qa_video.py measures a finished render for hook text size and contrast, frame 0, flashes, cuts, freezes, loop seam, loudness, silences and contact sheets usage examples.

python3 video-director/scripts/check_timeline.py timeline.json
python3 video-director/scripts/qa_video.py film.mp4 --out qa/ --beats timeline.json

Constraints

This is an instruction-and-QA skill, not a bundled model or hosted video-generation service. Output depends on the coding agent and on the available code execution and rendering tools. Claude Opus 5.5 is the primary intended model, though other capable coding agents can attempt the workflow.

The repository's own evaluation used three briefs, one run per configuration. It reports 28/28 assertions passed with the skill versus 25/28 without it in round 1, and 30/32 versus 26/32 in round 2, with a blind preference of 2–1 and 3–0 respectively eval results. Because each configuration was run once, the maintainer treats these as a direction rather than a controlled measurement. Guidance for character and illustrated films, revisions and live pages was added after round 2 and has not been evaluated. The project is MIT licensed.

HotRepo's take

HotRepo has no daily all-language ranking recorded for this repository, so there is no rank-based claim to make. The new-project snapshot for 3 November 2026 recorded 274 stars and 51 stars gained inside a roughly 24-hour window, with 5 forks gained. The hourly star samples show the count moving from 184 to 274 between 30 October and 3 November, with a faster rise late on 2 November. That is enough to show sustained interest over a few days, not enough to establish a longer trend. For readers, the more concrete signal is the repository's own small, explicitly caveated evaluation rather than its star count.