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🎬 Vox Director

Turn a single 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 plus local ffmpeg, and works with any coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, etc.). Give it a one-line topic; it gives you an mp4.

Football history · 60s	Mexican street food · 60s	A brief history of money · 60s	Silicon Valley history · 60s

_{▶ more films — click any thumbnail to play}

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What It Is

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

How It Works

A single 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 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.

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
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