What if you could create an entire animated film without using a traditional AI video generator?
Meet Cinecode, a new free, open-source filmmaking skill that lets Claude Code and Cursor turn simple prompts into complete videos.
And we're not just talking about short animations.
Cinecode can produce films longer than 10 minutes, complete with visuals, narration, music, sound effects, and editing.
Here's what you can create:
Short films: Animated stories with characters, environments, and cinematic camera movements.
2D and 3D animations: Procedural visuals built using JavaScript, Canvas, Three.js, and WebGL.
Product commercials: Animated advertisements with branding, typography, and visual effects.
Explainer videos: Educational content with diagrams, kinetic typography, and animated illustrations.
Music videos: Visuals synchronized with beats, rhythm, and lyrics.
YouTube documentaries: Longer videos with chapters, narration, research, and visual storytelling.
Social media content: Vertical videos designed for Shorts, Reels, and TikTok.
But here's what makes Cinecode particularly interesting.
Every generated frame is rendered from code.
Instead of asking an AI video model to predict pixels, Cinecode gives an AI coding agent a complete filmmaking workflow.
Here's how it works.
Step 1: Describe your idea
Tell Claude what you want to create.
For example:
"Create a 60-second cinematic animation about a lonely robot discovering an abandoned city."
Step 2: Develop the creative direction
Cinecode helps plan the story, visual style, camera movements, timing, transitions, and sound design.
You can choose between different aesthetics, including cinematic realism, anime, pixel art, claymation, paper cutouts, and experimental motion graphics.
Step 3: Generate the animation
Claude writes JavaScript that builds and animates the scenes.
The system renders individual frames through headless Chrome, using Canvas or Three.js.
Step 4: Create the soundtrack
Cinecode can generate procedural audio, mix sound effects, synchronize music, and add optional AI narration using Gemini TTS, ElevenLabs, or supported local voices.
Step 5: Review and export
The workflow produces a draft, checks visual and audio quality, allows revisions, and renders the final video as an MP4.
And here's another useful detail.
Cinecode has two production modes.
Quick Mode
Designed for shorter animations, commercials, explainers, and social media videos.
It can handle projects up to approximately three minutes, with a relatively lightweight review process.
Film Mode
Designed for longer productions, including short films, documentaries, and YouTube videos exceeding ten minutes.
It divides production into stages, with checkpoints for the script, visual direction, animatic, sound, and final render.
And the entire project runs on your own computer.
You don't need a separate paid video generation service.
The main requirements are:
Claude Code or Cursor
Node.js 22+
Python 3.9+
FFmpeg
Chrome, Chromium, or Edge
AI agent usage and optional voice-generation services may still incur costs. Longer productions also require more rendering time and disk space.
Want to try Cinecode?
For Claude Code, install it with:
git clone https://github.com/sarpstar/cinecode.git ~/.claude/skills/cinecode
For Cursor:
git clone https://github.com/sarpstar/cinecode.git ~/.cursor/skills/cinecode
Then open a new project and tell your agent:
"Let's make a short film with Cinecode. I want a 60-second animated science-fiction story with procedural 3D visuals, cinematic lighting, original sound design, and a finished MP4."
And here's why I find this fascinating.
We're seeing two very different approaches to AI filmmaking.
One generates video directly with enormous neural networks.
The other uses powerful coding agents to build the systems that create the animation.
And code-generated films have an important advantage.
You can change the timing, adjust the camera, modify the geometry, update the typography, or render the same scene again with predictable results.
Of course, creating a polished 10-minute film is considerably more demanding than generating a short animation.
But the possibility of turning a creative idea into a complete, reproducible, code-driven production is genuinely exciting.
We're moving from AI that generates video clips to AI agents that understand an entire filmmaking workflow.
And perhaps the next independent animation studio won't need a traditional rendering pipeline.
Just a computer, a good idea, and an AI agent that knows a little about cinema.
Cinecode on GitHub:
https://github.com/sarpstar/cinecode
English documentation and examples:
https://github.com/sarpstar/cinecode/blob/main/README.en.md
Free and open source under the MIT license.
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