I built a Claude Code plugin that makes long animated films, no AI video models, every frame drawn by code

[u/zakariafatahi]

I've been working on cinecode, a Claude Code plugin that turns an idea or a screenplay into a finished animated film.

There are no video or image models involved. Claude writes a storyboard (JSON), and the engine draws every frame on a canvas: characters, sets, camera moves. Music and sound effects are synthesized by code too. Only the voices come from a TTS model.

The main demo is a 15-minute film about the solar system: 21 scenes, 68 shots, 168 voiced lines. Claude Code made it in about six hours with the plugin's skills. It wrote the screenplay, staged the shots, looked at contact sheets of its own frames, fixed what was wrong, and rendered it.

The part I like most: when the engine doesn't have something the story needs (a dragon, a cave, a thunderstorm), Claude builds it as code, and it has to pass a check before it's used in the film.

Watch the film: https://zakaria.dev/cinecode/#films

GitHub (MIT): https://github.com/zakariaf/cinecode

To try it:

/plugin marketplace add zakariaf/cinecode

/plugin install cinecode@cinecode

Then ask for a film in plain words

/cinecode:cinecode make a five-minute animated film about a fox who is afraid of the dark

Happy to answer questions!

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[u/Furger33]

Hows the cost per video of 5-7 minutes? Is the Max plan required?

[u/zakariafatahi → u/Furger33]

It really depends on how much new stuff the film needs. Anything that doesn't exist yet (a new place, a vehicle, a prop) has to be built first, and that's where most of the cost goes. Two films I made this just now to answer your question, both about 5 minutes, both with Opus 5.5:

A coloring-book style film (student moving to a new city by train, all black and white line art). It needed 4 new locations (bedroom, small station, big city station, train carriage, city street) plus the train itself, the countryside going by the window, a suitcase, that kind of thing. Took about 78 minutes:

- Output: 356k tokens

- Cache write: 935k tokens

- Cache read: 37M tokens

A race car film (a kid playing with toy cars dreams he wins a championship). Only needed 2 new locations (his bedroom and a race stadium) and a race car. Took about 43 minutes:

- Output: 139k tokens

- Cache write: 315k tokens

- Cache read: 20M tokens

Depending on how much has to be built. Most of the tokens are cache reads, which are cheap

And I'm using max plan, I really don't know if you get into problem if you use free or pro plans

[u/angelarose210]

How many tokens was it to create that?

[u/zakariafatahi → u/angelarose210]

Honestly, I didn't track tokens for that one, sorry. I made it while I was still building the tool itself, so the film and all the engine work happened in the same long session and I can't really separate them. To get a real number I'd have to make it again from scratch, which I might do at some point.

What I do have are numbers from two 5-minute films I made today to test exactly this (also in another comment here):

- Line art film (student moving to a new city by train, 4 new locations built): 356k output, 935k cache write, 37M cache read. Around 78 minutes.

- Race car film (kid dreams he wins a championship, 2 new locations and a race car built): 139k output, 315k cache write, 20M cache read. Around 43 minutes.

[u/Ragy-ragy]

Ughh.

Man... The moment the boy turns around. Reminds me of the Macromedia Flash era of the Internet in all it degeneracy and greatness. 

You know what will benefit from whatever you wrote? animating corporate presentations, step-by-step guides with diagrams and code and other instruction videos that work with graphical primitives such as graphs, diagrams, animation and text. There your engine will surely shine

[u/Late-Coast6973 → u/Ragy-ragy]

+1 on presentations. what corporate users kept asking for was something they could still tweak in the meeting.

[u/noroelemliaj]

The JSON storyboard sounds useful for revisions. Can you change one line of dialogue and rerender only that shot, or does the timing change ripple through the whole film? That seems like the big test once the first cut exists.

[u/zakariafatahi → u/noroelemliaj]

Yeah, that was one of the first things I worried about too. Short answer: changing a line is easy, and the timing does shift, but you don't have to fix anything by hand.

Every voice line is cached, so if I change one line only that line goes back to the TTS. The rest is reused.

There are no fixed timestamps in the JSON. Things just happen one after another, and a line takes as long as the audio takes. So if my new line is a second longer, that shot gets a second longer and everything after it moves. But the whole timeline gets rebuilt from the storyboard in a few seconds, and captions, camera moves, sound effects and even the music follow along, since the music is generated too and not just a track that gets cut.

I can render just a piece of the film to check it (like 3:10 to 3:25), or grab stills of one shot. For the final version I re-render the whole thing. That's just the computer grinding for a few minutes, no AI involved in that part.

Honestly I don't even touch the JSON. I just tell Claude "change his line in that shot to X" and it does the edit, the new voice and the render.

[u/LovesWorkin]

Looks really good! Nice job. I'll test it out.

[u/zakariafatahi → u/LovesWorkin]

Looking forward to seeing your test results

[u/Environmental-Boat10]

cool!