video-shotcraft: An AI Cinematic Product Video Generator for Claude Code

Most tools sold as an ai cinematic product video generator hand you a text box and a stock-footage model. video-shotcraft, a Claude Code and Codex skill by Vincentwei1021, takes a different route. It doesn't generate footage. It generates the camera direction, built from a library of 152 named shot recipe cards and rendered through Remotion, a React-based video framework. Point it at a product page and it storyboards, sequences, and renders a promo using real screenshots instead of AI-hallucinated scenes.

What it actually builds

video-shotcraft is a skill, not a standalone app. It installs into Claude Code or Codex and gives the agent a reference library it can consult while working: capture scripts to screenshot your product's real pages, a set of shot recipe cards describing specific camera moves and timing, and Remotion components that implement each move as deterministic TypeScript, driven by a normalized progress value rather than random generation. The output is a rendered MP4 built from your actual product, not a synthetic likeness of it.

The shot vocabulary is the product

The scan that flagged this repo counted 106 shot cards. As of today the repository lists 152, spread across ten functional categories covering camera work, transitions, impact moments, text, and paper-texture treatments. Cards carry names like deck-deal-flyin (elements dealt into frame like cards), row-embed (a horizontal feature layout), spotlight-hero-card (a focused close-up on one product element), and flash-cuts (rhythmic scene transitions). Each card documents purpose, energy, duration, easing parameters, and known pitfalls, so the agent isn't guessing at pacing, it's picking from a catalog with the choreography already worked out. That's the actual bet the repo is making: the hard part of a good product video isn't the renderer, it's knowing which camera move to reach for and when to cut.

How the pipeline runs

The workflow follows three stages. Capture pulls real screenshots of your product pages using bundled scripts. Storyboarding is where the agent selects shot cards and sequences them, consulting production guides on visual direction and music-beat timing. Render hands the sequence to Remotion, which applies the easing and timing data from each card and composites in sound design from a bundled library of 149 sound effects and five background tracks. A "2.5D camera" component gives flat page screenshots a sense of depth, rotating and translating them along a virtual z-axis so a static screenshot reads as something the camera is moving through, without building actual 3D scenes. Beat-synced cuts time transitions to the background track rather than to an arbitrary clock.

The bundled template

The repo ships a reference build called Ink Press: a 36-second, 1080p promo using ten shots in a paper-ink-amber visual style, presented as a validated example rather than a placeholder. The intent is that a new user swaps in their own screenshots and branding while keeping the choreography, which is a more realistic starting point than an empty timeline.

Traction, verified

The scan caught this repo at 3,742 stars, up 104 in a day, the largest gain on that day's board. As of today it sits at 4,816 stars and 416 forks, created on GitHub less than a month ago (July 19). That's a fast climb for a skill this specific, and it lines up with the RISING flag rather than contradicting it. The shot-card count also grew, from 106 to 152, in the same window, which reads as active development rather than a stale snapshot. License is Apache-2.0 for the code; bundled audio assets carry their own attribution terms documented separately in the repo.

Who this is for, and who it isn't

This is a tool for people already comfortable running Claude Code or Codex against a real project, not a drag-and-drop video app. There's no web interface. Getting a finished video means having product pages worth screenshotting, a working Remotion setup, and enough patience to review a storyboard before rendering it. Remotion itself is free for individuals and small teams but requires a paid company license past a certain size, worth checking before building a workflow around it. It also won't write your script or generate footage that doesn't exist: every shot is built from real captures or bundled assets, which is the point, but it means product with no visual surface to capture (an API, a CLI-only tool) isn't a great fit.

It's a reasonable pairing with video-autopilot-kit style pipelines already in the AI Stack, but distinct from them: those tools are broad video-generation pipelines, while video-shotcraft is narrowly about giving an agent a professional camera vocabulary for one job, cinematic product promos.

Getting started

Install with:

npx skills add Vincentwei1021/video-shotcraft

or symlink the repo into ~/.claude/skills/ or ~/.codex/skills/ manually. From there, the agent reads the shot library and production guides on its own; the main setup work is making sure Remotion is configured and your product's pages are ready to capture.