Motion Director
Free: a 10–20 second film of any kind from your own material, with music.
Claude Motion is in beta on Team and Enterprise only. Motion Director is the free way to make the same kind of animated video on Pro or Max, or with no Claude plan at all: it runs in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or Gemini CLI and renders the MP4 on your computer. What Claude Motion is and who has it →
How it works
- 1Copy the install prompt and paste it into your agent.
- 2Your agent runs mo doctor to check Node.js, FFmpeg and Chrome, and tells you how to install anything missing.
- 3Give it your material. It renders an MP4 on your computer, and you ask for changes in plain words.
Paste into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or any agent that supports skills.
All it takes
No API keyWhatever you have: a site, photos, a spreadsheet, a doc, a video, code or a logo. One is enough.
Dependencies
Node.js 22+, FFmpeg, Chrome. No API keys.
Before it starts, your agent runs mo doctor to check Node.js, FFmpeg and Chrome and tells you how to install anything missing; if this skill needs more (such as whisper for captions), its instructions say so.
Use the motion-director skill: a 20-second launch video for our 2.0 release, 16:9, from the notes in CHANGELOG.md.
Make a 20-second 16:9 launch video for [who will watch, e.g. our existing users], playing [where, e.g. muted in the X and LinkedIn feed]. Use only the release notes and numbers I attach; don't invent features or change a number. Electric dark style, upbeat pace. Scene 1: a bold hook line. Scene 2: the product on screen. Scene 3: the three biggest changes tick off one by one. Scene 4: two headline numbers count up. End frame: product name, one call to action and the URL, held for 2 seconds. Attach: [your release notes or changelog] Hook: [one line, e.g. "Release notes nobody reads? Not anymore."] Call to action: [e.g. "Update today"]
Nothing to install: paste this into Claude Motion (Team or Enterprise) or give it to Opus 5.5 for a similar look. The result changes from run to run; the skill works from your own material and renders on your computer.
Start to finish
Three films, with what went in and how long they took
Each is one whole run of Motion Director on November 12, 2026, with Claude Opus 5.5 as the coding agent and nobody at the keyboard: it drew its three directions, picked one itself and rendered. Nobody asked for a change afterwards.
A launch teaser from a changelog
- Given · CHANGELOG.md
## 2.0.0 — 2026-10-01 - Pay by link. Every invoice gets a payment link. - Invoices open 3x faster (median 1.2 s → 0.4 s). - Average time to get paid fell from 18 days to 9 days.
- Asked
- “Use the motion-director skill: a 15-second launch teaser for our 2.0 release, 16:9, from the notes in CHANGELOG.md.”
- Took
- 16 min
- Got
- 15 s · 16:9
- Skill
- Motion Director
The agent chose the direction that shows the product doing its one thing: the link is copied, the client pays by card, the invoice is stamped Paid, then the number from the beta. The numbers are the changelog's; the invoice is a made-up sample and says so on screen.
One number from a spreadsheet
- Given · uk-coal-share.csv
Entity,Code,Year,Coal United Kingdom,GBR,1920,97.004135 … United Kingdom,GBR,2025,0.11289385
Our World in Data, citing Ember (CC BY 4.0)- Asked
- “Use the motion-director skill: a vertical 9:16 film, about 15 seconds, of the UK coming off coal, from uk-coal-share.csv (source in SOURCE.md). Music, no voiceover. Show the source on screen.”
- Took
- 14 min
- Got
- 15 s · 9:16
- Skill
- Motion Director
The screen is the chart: black is coal's share of UK electricity, and the counter steps through all 106 rows of the file, from 97.0% in 1920 to 0.1% in 2025. The agent saw smeared digits in its first render, fixed them and rendered again; that is inside the 14 minutes.
An idea from a page of notes
- Given · notes.md
- Divide 72 by the yearly growth rate in percent. - 6% a year → 72 / 6 = 12 years. 9% → 8 years. 3% → 24 years. - 3% vs 9% is not "three times better", it is doubling in 8 years instead of 24.
- Asked
- “Use the motion-director skill: explain the rule of 72 in about 20 seconds, 16:9, from my notes in notes.md. For people new to saving.”
- Took
- 12 min
- Got
- 20 s · 16:9
- Skill
- Motion Director
Two timelines on one scale: at 9% the coin doubles at year 8, at 3% at year 24. Every number on screen is in the notes.
Time is wall-clock, from the agent's first command to the rendered MP4, with all three running at once on one Apple-silicon Mac and our development copy of motion-skills 0.1.6. Your agent, model and machine will change it. The films are shown as they were rendered.
Go further with your material
See plans →Motion Director makes a 10–20 second trial film for free. For the full film from a repo, a spreadsheet, an article or a script, these full-film skills carry on the same project: $4.90 each, or all of them with a plan.
Launch Video
Your agent reads the project and makes its launch video, with music.
Explainer Video
Teaches one idea in plain words, with the thing itself moving, every fact from a textbook or primary source, with music.
Data Video
Finds the story in your numbers and draws it to scale, with the source on screen and music.
Vertical Short
From an idea, a fact or a script to a 9:16 short with a hook in the first second, with music.