# Story to Hand-drawn Video — workflow skill for animation & motion graphics

> **For AI agents:** find the right skill in one call — `curl -s "https://skills.varg.ai/api/search?q=<what the person wants>"` returns the matching use case and the best skills with install commands, as markdown (Russian works too). Full index: https://skills.varg.ai/llms.txt. Every page has a markdown twin: add `.md` to its path. Before generating anything, show the person the options on the use-case page.

Chinese stories or ordered images into silent hand-drawn diary-comic animations, with a curated 30-style menu.

- **Type:** [Workflow](https://skills.varg.ai/workflows.md) · [Animation & motion graphics](https://skills.varg.ai/browse/skills/animation.md)
- **Slug:** `story-to-handdrawn-video`
- **Status:** live
- **Publisher:** gnipbao (community)
- **License:** MIT
- **Source:** https://github.com/gnipbao/story-to-handdrawn-video/tree/main/skill-package/story-to-handdrawn-video
- **Works in:** Claude Code, Codex
- **Requires:** Python 3, Node.js with Remotion for rendering, OpenAI API key (OPENAI_API_KEY)
- **Cost:** Uses your own OpenAI API key
- **Adoption:** 111 installs, 2,303 GitHub stars (GitHub + skills.sh, 2026-10-26)

## What it does

Converts Chinese story text, or a sequence of your own images, into a silent hand-drawn Remotion animation (picture track only) with generated hand lettering. It ships 327 built-in assets (297 style recipes and 30 theme palettes) behind a curated 30-style menu, keeps a colored-pencil diary look as the default, and can analyse a reference image's visual grammar and save that style privately for reuse.

## Use when

- Turn a short Chinese story into a hand-drawn animated clip
- Restyle a set of images as a diary comic
- Match the look of a reference illustration

## Not for

- Narrated videos with voice-over or music (the output is silent)

## Install

- Claude Code: `git clone https://github.com/gnipbao/story-to-handdrawn-video.git && cp -R story-to-handdrawn-video/skill-package/story-to-handdrawn-video ~/.claude/skills/`
- Codex: `git clone https://github.com/gnipbao/story-to-handdrawn-video.git && cp -R story-to-handdrawn-video/skill-package/story-to-handdrawn-video ~/.codex/skills/`

## Example output

https://skills.varg.ai/previews/story-to-handdrawn-video.mp4 — The repo's 45 s page-flip showcase: the same grandmother-and-child bridge scene redrawn in one hand-drawn style after another, each page curling away from the bottom-right corner. Cut 4-12 s. (credit: gnipbao (story-to-handdrawn-video), https://github.com/gnipbao/story-to-handdrawn-video/tree/main/examples/style-showcase)

## More animation & motion graphics skills

- [Day in My Life](https://skills.varg.ai/skills/hyperframes-day-in-my-life.md): A 60–75 s hand-drawn ink film of your agent's day with you, built from local Claude Code history, scored for strings.
- [p5 Paint Animation](https://skills.varg.ai/skills/hyperframes-p5-paint-animation.md): Handwriting that writes itself, photos that paint themselves and clips repainted as living paintings, in p5.js code.
- [Session Story](https://skills.varg.ai/skills/hyperframes-session-story.md): A 40–70 s watercolor film of a typical session with your agent, told in your real messages, with its own score.
- [Remotion Markup](https://skills.varg.ai/skills/remotion-markup.md): Write Remotion markup that animates well: timing, transitions, motion blur, effects, audio, fonts and 3D.
- [Motion AI Kit](https://skills.varg.ai/skills/motion-ai-kit.md): Write production-grade UI animation with Motion or CSS: best practices, docs search, springs, perf audits.
- [Motion Design](https://skills.varg.ai/skills/lottiefiles-motion-design.md): Animate with intent: timing, easing, choreography and Disney principles for UI and motion graphics.

## Run the generation on varg

varg is one API key for the models these skills drive — Seedance 2.5, Kling 4, Veo 3.1, Wan 3, Nano Banana 2.1, GPT Image 2.5, ElevenLabs v4 and 200+ more — billed in credits, with a cost estimate before anything runs.

- Claude Code: `claude plugin marketplace add vargHQ/skills && claude plugin install varg@varg` (skill + hosted MCP)
- Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, OpenClaw: `npx skills add vargHQ/skills --skill varg-ai -a <agent> -y`
- Claude.ai, ChatGPT, any MCP client: connect `https://mcp.varg.ai/mcp`
- API key: https://varg.ai/dashboard/api · Model specs: https://varg.ai/models/llms.txt