Free Claude skills that render finished video in code

Free, agent-run toolchains that draw finished video in code are having a week. Four of them now ship a whole pipeline. Three turn a topic into a 9:16 short: you hand a coding agent a topic, it writes the script and the shot plan, and a local renderer turns the result into a 9:16 video with no video generation model anywhere in the loop. The fourth, a music-video skill set, starts from a song instead. No per-second API, no re-roll when one detail moves. The file is yours.

The one that set the pace is Claude Animated Shorts. It went up on November 1 and by the weekend it was the repo short-form channels were passing around. The three beside it do different jobs: a narrated explainer kit, a kinetic-text skill that can post for you, and a set of music-video skills. All four are MIT licensed and all four render on your own machine. Here is what each is good for this week.

Claude Animated Shorts (mromidev)

This is the one to start with if you want the look that is all over TikTok: flat 2D characters with ink outlines walking through a painted 3D town, with lens blur, gliding cameras, a march score and sound effects. It is an MIT-licensed Claude Code skill, created on November 1, 2026, and it carried more than 2,300 GitHub stars and more than 500 forks, read November 8, 2026. The repo states the whole thing renders with three.js inside Remotion on your own PC, with no AI video generator.

What earns your evening is the proof, not the pitch. The skill ships the full source of a 67-second short, The Bridge That Fell for a Song, about the 1831 Broughton bridge collapse and the 74 soldiers who marched it down, so you copy a finished project rather than a promise. It also ships STYLE_BIBLE.md, seven measured look reports, 38 reference frames and 20 contact sheets, which gives the agent a fixed target to check its own frames against. Budget disk, not patience: a 2K render runs at about four frames a second, roughly ten minutes for the 67-second example, but every Remotion bundle copies about 1.3 GB of assets into a temp folder, and the skill's own notes record a render that died when the drive filled.

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• Maker: mromidev
• License: MIT for code and docs; reference frames for style study only
• Output: 55 to 70 second vertical short, 1080x1920 at 30 fps, 2K export
• Needs: Remotion with @remotion/three, Node, Python 3, ffmpeg
• Stars: more than 2,300, read November 8, 2026
• Try it: https://github.com/mromidev/claude-animated-shorts

If one measured cartoon town is too narrow a lane, the next one is built for explainers with a voice and no camera.

shorts-kit (howznguyen)

shorts-kit turns a topic into a narrated vertical short, and it is the most process-heavy of the four. It ships nine agent skills started by one pipeline, 20 storytelling flows, a Remotion library of word-timed captions and camera moves, eight sound effects the kit generates itself, and a local dashboard that tracks each video from brief to render. It is MIT licensed, created on November 4, 2026, and carried more than 100 stars, read November 8, 2026. Unlike the others, it never posts anything: you review, then upload the file yourself.

The reason to try it is the fact ledger. No sentence reaches a script before its claim has a verified record, and a linter enforces it, which is the discipline most faceless channels skip and then regret. The author says the rules come from a private pipeline that took a knowledge channel to about 120,000 views on its best video in two months. You approve the script, listen to the voice once end to end, look at the stills, and the agent handles the rest.

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• Maker: howznguyen
• License: MIT
• Output: narrated vertical shorts for TikTok, Shorts and Reels
• Needs: a coding agent that runs commands, Remotion, Node (bun)
• Stars: more than 100, read November 8, 2026
• Try it: https://github.com/howznguyen/shorts-kit

For shorts with no narration at all, the third one drops the voice and lets the words carry the screen.

Remotion Shorts Skill (social-media-skills)

Remotion Shorts Skill makes kinetic-text shorts from a topic, an article, a dataset or a changelog: big animated words, stat count-ups, top-N lists and quotes, all at 1080x1920 and 30 fps. It is MIT licensed, created on November 3, 2026, and carried more than 10 stars, read November 8, 2026. It works in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and OpenClaw, and the tested Remotion project is fixed, so your agent writes one JSON file of scenes instead of new video code for every post.

Two details make it worth a look. Before anything renders, it lays out every scene, fits the largest font that balances across two or three lines, times each scene to reading speed, and writes a review sheet of every scene and every cut, so you catch a bad hook before you spend a render. And a 20-second short renders in under a minute on a recent laptop. When you are happy, it posts to TikTok, Reels and Shorts through WoopSocial, but only after you say yes.

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• Maker: social-media-skills
• License: MIT; Remotion has its own license
• Output: 1080x1920 kinetic-text short, 30 fps, H.264 and AAC
• Posts to: TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts through WoopSocial
• Stars: more than 10, read November 8, 2026
• Try it: https://github.com/social-media-skills/remotion-shorts-skill

If your vertical work is scored rather than spoken, the last pick is the one built for a song.

Claude Video Skills (Imaginative Prompting)

Claude Video Skills is a set of nine skills for music videos made in code, published after the maker's first four videos. The set covers shot design with a card per camera move, animation principles with anticipation and overshoot, song timing from the music tool's own stems, blocking with simple shapes first, look and light, rendering in chunks, render checks for flicker and blank frames, running several agent sessions on one video, and a single review page for every draft. It is MIT licensed, created on November 3, 2026, and carried more than 5 stars, read November 8, 2026.

Every video on the channel is rendered entirely in code with Remotion and three.js, and the songs are made in Suno, so the skills assume that stack and carry over loosely to others. The author's own advice is the honest part: you do not need all of it, and your vision for the shots matters more than any single skill in the set. Copy the whole folder anyway, because the skills refer to each other.

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• Maker: Imaginative Prompting
• License: MIT
• Skills: nine, from shot design to render checks
• Output: music videos rendered in code with Remotion and three.js, songs from Suno
• Stars: more than 5, read November 8, 2026
• Try it: https://github.com/Imaginative-Prompting/claude-video-skills