🚨 The problem with making explainer videos today:

• ❌ Fragmented workflow — separate tools for scripting, image gen, animation, voice-over, music, and captions
• ❌ No narrative structure — raw text-to-video models don't understand story arcs, hooks, or pacing
• ❌ Inconsistent look — the collage aesthetic drifts from shot to shot
• ❌ Hours of manual editing — stitching, ducking music, and burning captions by hand

💡 The solution:

🎬 Screenwriter, Collage Artist, Animator, and Editor — all in one automated pipeline.

Type one topic. The agent writes the story beats, renders each beat as a torn-paper collage poster, animates it, adds a narrator voice-over, music, and burned-in captions — then stitches everything into a finished final.mp4. You stay in control with just two approval gates: the story beat map and the visual theme.

🎨 Explore 50+ more open-source AI apps →

🎥 Demo

▶️ Watch the demo — one topic in, a fully narrated & captioned Vox-style collage video out.

"Make me a 15-second Vox-style collage video on the history of coffee." → a styled final.mp4, fully narrated and captioned.

📑 Table of Contents

• ✨ Key Features
• 🎨 The Look
• 🔄 How It Works
• 🧩 Models
• 🚀 Quick Start
• 🛠️ Project Structure
• 🔗 Related Projects

✨ Key Features

• One topic → finished film — a single one-line prompt produces a complete, captioned, narrated video
• Authentic Vox collage aesthetic — torn paper, cutouts, tape, halftone dots, newspaper clippings, bold flat color, big headlines
• Story-first — picks a narrative arc (timeline, problem-agitate-solution, how-it-works…) and writes a hook-led beat map before generating anything
• Style bake-off — renders the same beat in 3–4 themes so you pick the look before committing
• Living-poster motion — animates each collage keyframe into dynamic motion instead of static slides
• Voice + music + captions — narration, background music ducked under the voice, and burned-in captions, all automated
• Two human gates, everything else automated — approve the beat map, pick the theme; the pipeline handles the rest
• Agent-native — a self-contained skill any coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, …) can read and run
• One API key + ffmpeg — no cluster of accounts to wire up

🎨 The Look

The aesthetic is the modern editorial paper-collage popularized by Vox explainers and creators like Stav Zilber and rom1trs: hand-cut paper cutouts, torn edges, tape, halftone dots, newspaper clippings, bold flat colors per beat, and big cutout headlines — brought to life with dynamic motion, a narrator voice-over, music, and burned-in captions.

The collage look is born in the image step (each beat is a finished collage poster), and the motion is added after — so the DNA of the style is locked in before anything moves.

🔄 How It Works

A single topic flows through a 6-stage pipeline driven by one beats.json per project:

topic
  │
  ├─ 1. Beat Map        Pick a narrative arc → write beats.json          ◀── GATE 1: approve the beat map
  ├─ 2. Style Bake-Off  Render the same beat in 3–4 themes               ◀── GATE 2: pick the look
  ├─ 3. Keyframes       One collage poster per beat
  ├─ 4. Motion          Animate each poster into a clip
  ├─ 5. Voice & Music   Narration + background music
  ├─ 6. Assemble        Stitch clips, duck music, burn captions (ffmpeg)
  └─ final.mp4

Two human decision gates keep you in control — approve the story beat map and select the visual theme. Everything else is fully automated.

🧩 Models

🚀 Quick Start

1. Install local dependencies

• ffmpeg + ffprobe (brew install ffmpeg on macOS)
• Python 3 with Pillow (pip install pillow)

2. Configure environment keys

export MUAPI_API_KEY="your-api-key"     # image / video / voice / music models — key from muapi.ai
export OPENAI_API_KEY="your-openai-key"  # story planning

3. Ask your coding agent (with this skill loaded)

"Make me a 15-second Vox-style collage video introducing the history of coffee."

The agent drafts a beat map, runs a style bake-off, generates keyframes, animates the clips, generates speech and music, and assembles the result under out/<project>/final.mp4.

🛠️ Project Structure

.
├── SKILL.md            # the full agent workflow + the two approval gates
├── AGENTS.md           # entry point for any coding agent
├── scripts/            # one script per pipeline stage
│   ├── style_bakeoff.py
│   ├── keyframes.py
│   ├── clips.py
│   ├── audio.py
│   ├── assemble.py
│   └── ...
├── references/         # prompt guide, beat/story library, voices
└── examples/           # sample beats.json

This is an agent skill — Claude Code auto-loads it from SKILL.md; Codex and other agents follow SKILL.md via AGENTS.md. Just ask for a "vox video" or a "collage video."

🔗 Related Projects

• Open-AI-Micro-Drama-Generator — agentic AI micro-drama video generator
• AI-B-roll — auto-generate AI b-roll for your videos
• Text-To-Video-AI — generate full videos from text
• AI-Youtube-Shorts-Generator — auto-clip long videos into viral vertical shorts
• awesome-ai-video-models — compare AI video models by API, price & speed