You can make a finished motion graphics video without opening a video editor. Claude Code writes the animation as code, a renderer turns that code into an MP4, and you do the part a director does: decide what the film says, then look at it and say what to change.
This guide covers the setup and the way of working. It doesn’t depend on a particular style, brand or voice. You bring your own idea, and Claude does the building.
How it works
The video is a Remotion project: React components that draw each frame as a function of time. Claude writes and edits those components. Remotion renders them in a headless browser and encodes the result with ffmpeg. Since everything is code, every change is a precise edit, and the film can be rebuilt or reused at any time.
Step 1: set up your machine
- Claude Code, running in a terminal on your machine.
- A motion design skill. We use cinetic by Leonxlnx (GitHub, MIT licence), installed with
npx skills add Leonxlnx/cinetic. - Node 22 or newer, ffmpeg, Python 3.11 or newer and a headless Chromium. You don’t need to install these by hand. Ask Claude to check what is missing and set it up.
- A Remotion company licence if your company has more than three employees. Individuals and smaller companies use it for free.
A skill is a folder of instructions and scripts that Claude loads when a task matches it. Claude can write Remotion code without one, but the result tends to look generic. A good motion skill gives Claude a designer’s habits: it writes a brief before any code, times every move to a beat, works out sound effects from the picture, and checks its own renders before showing you anything. Read the skill’s README once, so you know which steps it will take and which questions it will ask.
Step 2: brief Claude in one message
Start a new folder, open Claude Code and say what the film is for. These are the decisions only you can make, and they are expensive to change later:
Use the cinetic skill to make a motion graphics video.
What it is about: <your product, your idea, or the message>
Where it plays: <Instagram Reel, YouTube, a landing page, a presentation>
Shape: <portrait 1080x1920 / landscape 1920x1080 / square>
Length: <a target, or "as long as it needs">
Sound: <music, sound effects only, a voice-over, or silent>
Brand: <colours, fonts, logo file, or "invent one">
Tone: <calm, playful, technical, cinematic...>
Two of these deserve a second look. Shape: design for the platform from the start. A landscape film cropped to a vertical Reel looks wrong, because the layout was never meant for it. Sound: say early whether you want music, because a good skill plans the sound together with the picture.
Claude will reply with a brief and a treatment: the idea in one line, the story beat by beat, and every word that will appear on screen. It asks you to approve that before building anything. Read it properly. Changing a sentence costs nothing at this stage. Changing it after the build means reworking scenes.
Step 3: give it a script, with notes
If you already know what the film should say, write it yourself and put the visual ideas in brackets, like notes for an animator:
Here is the script. Scene ideas are in brackets.
<line 1>
(what the viewer should see while this is said)
<line 2>
(a problem shown, not described)
...
(the ending: be creative)
You keep control of the message, and Claude turns each bracket into a scene. Leave a few brackets open (“be creative”, “surprise me”) and you will get ideas you would not have had yourself.
For a longer film, ask Claude to split the work: one shared plan for timing, colours and rules, then the scenes built in parallel by subagents. It works like briefing a small team of animators, and it keeps a long film consistent.
Step 4: review frames, not videos
Even a short film takes minutes to render, so you won’t iterate by watching video. Ask Claude for stills at the key moments and for contact sheets: one image with a frame every few hundredths of a second, each labelled with its time. A sheet shows you pacing, layout and dead moments in a few seconds.
When something is off, say what you see, not how to fix it. Short lists work best:
- the cards in the middle look flat, make them more detailed
- the cycling is too fast to follow, slow it down a little
- remove the chime on every item
- the labels on the zoom out are clutter, remove them
Claude changes what you named and leaves the rest alone. If it changes more than you asked for, tell it so. That is feedback too.
Step 5: get a second opinion
Before you give your own notes, ask Claude to run a director review in a subagent. That is a fresh instance that never saw the build, given only the contact sheets and a critic’s brief (good motion skills ship one). It has no attachment to the work, so it is blunt: it scores the cut and lists what is weak, such as a soft opening, a dead stretch, or text that competes with the voice. Let Claude fix those first. Your own notes can then be about taste rather than mechanics.
Step 6: sound and voice
A motion skill can derive the sound effects from the animation itself, so a click lands on the frame where a button is pressed and a whoosh peaks where the camera moves fastest. Your job is the character: music or none, how busy, what to remove.
For a voice-over you need a text-to-speech model. You can use a hosted service, or run an open model on a rented GPU and keep full control. We wrote a separate guide for the second option: AI voice-overs on a cloud GPU, with ComfyUI on Modal. Once you have the recordings, ask Claude to time the picture to the spoken words, so things land on the word they illustrate.
Step 7: render, and keep an eye on it
There are two kinds of render:
- Preview. Sharp and fairly quick. Watch it in full before anything else.
- Master. The final file, often with real motion blur, made by rendering several sub-frames per frame and blending them. It looks filmed rather than computed, and it is slow. On a laptop without a strong GPU, a 30 second master took us about two hours.
Three habits save time:
- Never start a master on a cut you haven’t watched as a preview.
- Run one render at a time and close what you can. Rendering is heavy on memory.
- Ask Claude to watch the render: “check every 20 minutes and tell me if it stops”. A render that halts on a quality check can otherwise sit there for hours before anyone notices.
At the end, ask for the platform version you need. For Instagram we ask for 30 fps H.264 with the file’s index at the start (often called fast start), so the sound plays from the first second while the video loads.
Step 8: make the next one cheaper
When you are happy with a film, ask Claude to write down the process: what stays the same on every film (shape, colours, sound, ending) and the problems it hit on the way. Keep that playbook in the project, or ask Claude to save it to its memory. Your next film starts from a working project and a known recipe instead of a blank folder.
Checklist
- Install Claude Code and a motion skill, and let Claude install the rest.
- Brief in one message: what it is about, where it plays, shape, length, sound, brand, tone.
- Approve the copy before anything is built.
- Give a script with scene notes in brackets, and leave room for ideas.
- Review stills and contact sheets, and run a director review before your own notes.
- Give feedback as short lists of what you see.
- Approve the preview, then render the master and have Claude watch it.
- Ask for a playbook, so the next film is faster.
If you would like help with a video like this, or with getting AI-built software into production, run our free technical diagnostic or see our work.