AI video · Checked 4 August 2026

movie-gen: Make a cheap animatic before AI video

Fix story and timing before paying to generate every clip.

movie-gen is an open-source Claude Code workflow for building AI short films from character anchors, still-frame animatics, generated clips, voices, and ffmpeg assembly.

Type
repository
Works on
Claude Code, Python, ffmpeg

Open movie-gen ↗︎

Make the whole rough cut from stills first

movie-gen documents and supplies scripts for a short-film pipeline driven from Claude Code. It starts with consistent character images and scene frames, casts voices, cuts a still-image animatic, generates video clips, then assembles and reviews the film with ffmpeg and a browser storyboard.

The most reusable move is the animatic. Hold each scene’s start frame for its planned duration, add draft speech and music, and review the complete story before generating expensive clips. The project’s own logs report that a draft voice line cost far less than a video clip, although provider prices can change.

This is a working repository, not a one-command video app. It expects paid Higgsfield and ElevenLabs access, optional Gemini access, Claude Code, ffmpeg, and active direction. Generated footage can still regress between takes, so keep previous versions and use the cheapest fix that addresses each note.

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