vox-director

🎬 Vox Director

Turn one topic into a finished Vox-style paper-collage explainer / ad video — script, collage keyframes, motion, voice-over, music and captions, all automated.

An agent skill that runs end to end on the Atlas Cloud API + local ffmpeg, usable by any coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, etc.). You give it a one-line topic; it gives you an mp4.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ed08d230-7bcb-4b48-a17d-23c079208f9f

▶ "The evolution of Chinese civilization" · 30s

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What it is

The look is the modern editorial paper-collage popularized by Vox explainers: hand-cut paper cut-outs, torn edges, tape, halftone dots, newspaper clippings, bold flat color per beat, big cut-out headlines — brought to life with motion, a narrator, music and captions.

How it works

One topic flows through one script per stage, all driven by a single beats.json per project:

topic
  │
  ├─ 1. beat map        pick a narrative arc → write beats.json      ◀── GATE 1: you approve the beat map
  ├─ 2. style bake-off  render the same beat in 3–4 themes           ◀── GATE 2: you pick the look by eye
  ├─ 3. keyframes       one collage poster per beat  (nano-banana-2)
  ├─ 4. motion          animate each poster          (gemini-omni-flash i2v)
  ├─ 5. voice + music   one narrator (xai/tts) + BGM (minimax/music)
  ├─ 6. assemble        ffmpeg: concat, duck music under VO, burn captions + watermark
  └─ final.mp4

That flow is B-roll — a topic in, everything generated. Two more input modalities, plus a presenter mode, reuse the same engine:

• A-roll — you already have a talking-head video. It is ASR-segmented into beats and re-styled into the collage look, keeping the real face, lip-sync and gestures frame-for-frame (gemini-omni-flash/video-edit, auto-retrying on seedance-2.0/reference-to-video).
• C-roll — you have one still photo (a selfie, a product shot). The subject is cut out as a photographic sticker — never redrawn — and each beat's poster is generated around it (nano-banana-2/edit). The narration can be cloned into the subject's own voice.
• Host — one image of a presenter. Selected beats cut to a digital presenter who speaks the narration, lip-synced, inside the collage world (16:9 and 9:16; position and size adjustable). The presenter and the world are generated as two plates and keyed together (seedance-2.0/reference-to-video + gemini-omni-flash/image-to-video).

Two ideas make or break the result, and the skill is built around both:

1. The look is born in the image step. Each beat is a finished collage poster. All the collage DNA (torn paper, cut-outs, halftone, headline text) lives in that image — if the poster isn't a rich collage, nothing downstream saves it.
2. The motion is added after. By default an AI video model animates the whole poster (the "living poster" path). For dramatic piece-by-piece assembly, an optional local keyframe engine cuts the poster into parts and drives them frame-by-frame (no content filters, pixel-exact — great for real people).

Two human decision gates keep you in control (approve the beat map; pick the style); everything else is automated.

Models (verified on Atlas Cloud)

Job	Model
Keyframe / collage poster	google/nano-banana-2/text-to-image
Animate (non-real content)	google/gemini-omni-flash/image-to-video
Animate (real people / brands)	kwaivgi/kling-video-o3-pro/image-to-video
Re-style a talking-head (A-roll)	google/gemini-omni-flash/video-edit
Anchor a photo in the collage (C-roll)	google/nano-banana-2/edit
Presenter on camera (Host)	bytedance/seedance-2.0/reference-to-video + google/gemini-omni-flash/image-to-video
Narration	xai/tts-v1
Narration in a real person's voice	bytedance/seed-audio-1.0 (voice cloning)
Music	minimax/music-2.6
Cut out an element (advanced path)	youchuan/v8.1/remove-background

Model IDs drift — the skill fetches the live list from GET https://api.atlascloud.ai/api/v1/models before running.

Install

This is an agent skill — it works with any coding agent that can read a workflow and run scripts (Claude Code, Codex, …). Claude Code auto-discovers it as a skill; other agents read AGENTS.md → SKILL.md.

Option A — from this repo:

git clone https://github.com/Alisa0808/vox-director.git ~/.claude/skills/vox-director

Option B — from the packaged skill: download vox-director.skill and install it via your Claude skills UI.

Then set your Atlas Cloud API key (get one at atlascloud.ai/console/api-keys):

export ATLASCLOUD_API_KEY="sk-..."

Quick start

Just ask your coding agent, with the skill installed:

"Make me a Vox-style collage video introducing Mexican street food — English, 16:9, 15 seconds."

The agent will draft a beat map for your approval, run a style bake-off for you to pick from, then generate keyframes → motion → voice → music and assemble out/<project>/final.mp4.

Requirements

• A coding agent — Claude Code, Codex, or similar
• Atlas Cloud API key
• ffmpeg + ffprobe (brew install ffmpeg)
• Python 3 with Pillow (pip install pillow) — for caption/watermark overlays

What's in the box

SKILL.md              the skill (English) — the workflow the agent follows
SKILL.zh.md           the same skill in Chinese
AGENTS.md             entry point for non-Claude agents (Codex, …)
references/           the creative engine
  prompt-guide.md       the LOOK layer — prompt structures, vocab & 9 theme presets
  beat-layer.md         14 narrative arcs + hook/pacing + shot patterns
  voices.md             xai/tts voice roster — pick a voice_id per language/tone
  models-and-gotchas.md every API / ffmpeg gotcha, already solved
  local-engine.md       the advanced element-level motion engine
scripts/              one script per pipeline stage
examples/             ready-to-run beats.json examples
assets/               the showcase film

Credits

Built by @alisaqqt — follow for more agent-skill experiments.

Inspired by the collage-ad workflows of Stav Zilber, rom1trs and Higgsfield, and by Vox's explainer visual language.

Built end to end on Atlas Cloud — one prompt, one film.

License

MIT © 2026 Alisa Qian