drama-skills

drama-skills is an AI short-drama and motion-comic toolkit open-sourced by ZenStory AI (GitHub organization zenstory-ai). It has 11 Skills, and once they're installed in a coding agent such as Claude Code or Codex, the writing is done by that agent's own model. The workflow runs from a quick read of the source novel and an episode plan, through single-episode scripts, character, location and prop design, reference-image prompts, storyboards with frozen keyframes and video prompts, to confirmed production, editing and review. Each Skill installs on its own, so if you already have a script or storyboard you can start at that stage. Everything creative for an episode lives in five Markdown files: script, visual design, storyboard, image prompts and video prompts. A look that has to hold across shots is written as a "continuity lock", a short phrase pasted into prompts as is, and a check script points out which shot left a character out or where a shot's length disagrees with its video prompt. The editing Skill writes down why each in and out point was chosen, takes subtitles word for word from the script, and renders with FFmpeg after levelling loudness. The README says the toolkit came out of the team's own motion-comic studio, which has worked on over a thousand projects since 2025. What sets it apart is a clean line between writing and spending money: only short-drama-produce calls outside services to generate images, video, voice and music, and every batch first shows the exact count, prompts, reference images, parameters and output paths; it runs only after you've seen that preview and explicitly confirmed, each confirmation covers one run, and a retry after a failure needs a fresh confirmation.

Who it's for:screenwriters, directors and small production teams making AI short dramas or motion comics, and writers who want to break a novel they have adaptation rights to into episode scripts. You'll need to be comfortable using an AI coding tool such as Claude Code or Codex in a terminal.

Before you start: install everything with npx skills add zenstory-ai/drama-skills -y -g, or link only the Skill folders you need. You need Node.js to run npx and Python 3.9 or later, plus ffmpeg and ffprobe for the final cut; installing and upgrading runs a Python self-test. Writing, storyboards and prompts need no GPU and no media-service account, and stay entirely at the text stage. Actually generating images, video, voice or music goes through short-drama-produce, with endpoints and credentials for services such as Seedance, GPT Image 2 and MiniMax that you configure outside the project; prompts, reference images and reference audio are sent to those services and billed at their rates. The README says video generation for its 68-second sample clip cost about ¥40. If the process drops after a video job is submitted, don't resubmit; collect the result first as the docs describe, so you aren't charged twice. The local Dashboard runs only on your machine behind an access token and doesn't upload project content. Adapt only novels you own or have permission to adapt, and make sure you're authorized to use any real-voice references and uploaded material. The optional Remotion subtitle layout in the editing step has its own dependencies and terms. The repo's maintainers folder also holds a short-drama-knowhow Skill meant for maintainers, not regular users, which AI Inspiration World hasn't checked or recommended. Docs are mainly in Chinese, with an English README. MIT licensed.

Based on the project's public documentation. Not tested by AI Inspiration World.