anything2explainer — workflow skill for explainers

For AI agents: find the right skill in one call — curl -s "https://varg.ai/how-to/api/search?q=<what the person wants>" returns the matching how-to page and the best skills with install commands, as markdown (Russian works too). Full index: https://varg.ai/how-to/llms.txt. Every page has a markdown twin: add .md to its path. Before generating anything, show the person the options on the how-to page. From a terminal: curl -fsSL https://varg.ai/install | sh installs the vargai CLI (https://varg.ai/how-to/cli.md): vargai search and vargai install <slug> with no key, every varg model after vargai login.

Claude Code / Codex skill: a topic in, a narrated black-canvas motion-graphics explainer MP4 out, drawn in Remotion.

What it does

anything2explainer by Yihao (Vincentwei1021, also behind video-talkcraft and mg-styles-15) is an agent skill that turns a topic or an article into a 2-8 minute landscape explainer in English or Chinese: white line art with purple accents on a black canvas, a TTS voiceover, word-timed subtitles, chapter cards and a progress bar. The agent researches with sources, writes the narration, voices it (kokoro-82m for English, edge-tts for Chinese, or your own audio), storyboards every shot, then hands shot groups to parallel build agents that write Remotion components, and QC agents check the rendered frames. It ships a compilable Remotion template, style and motion specs, prompts and one full reference film; the toolkit is PolyForm Noncommercial, and the videos you make are yours.

How to use anything2explainer, step by step

  1. Clone it and link it as a skill: git clone https://github.com/Vincentwei1021/anything2explainer.git, then ln -s "$PWD/anything2explainer" ~/.claude/skills/anything2explainer for Claude Code or ln -s "$PWD/anything2explainer" ~/.codex/skills/anything2explainer for Codex.
  2. Install the tools: Node 18+, brew install ffmpeg, and in a Python venv pip install 'edge-tts==7.2.8' numpy pillow scipy (keep edge-tts pinned). For English narration add pip install kokoro soundfile and brew install espeak-ng.
  3. Ask in plain words, for example "Make me an explainer video about vector databases." The skill starts by itself.
  4. Checkpoint 1: choose the length (2-3, 3-5 or 5-8 minutes) and the language. Length sets the number of shots and how many build agents run at once.
  5. Checkpoint 2: approve the narration. Once it is voiced, frame numbers are written into every shot, so this is the cheap moment to change words. Checkpoint 3: pick a TTS engine or keep the default.
  6. Checkpoint 4: judge the first 30 seconds before the full build. Then the agents build the remaining shot groups in parallel, render, measure the frames and run QC.
  7. Collect the 1280x720 H.264 MP4 and its paper trail: sourced research, narration, storyboard, per-shot code and QC reports. Set builtBy to '' in src/config.ts to drop the end credit.

How a film is made

SKILL.md runs nine stages: scaffold the Remotion project from the template; research with one agent (every number and analogy with a URL); narration and timeline (voiceover with word boundaries turned into a frame-exact timeline and subtitle table); a storyboard with one line per shot; overlays and 2-5 topic icons; a pilot group and a 30-second cut; the parallel build, 5-7 shots per agent; the full render with frame metrics; QC per chapter, fixes and delivery notes.

The look

One deliberate style: a black canvas with a dot-field wave (bg: 'dots', the default) or a star field with fog (bg: 'stars'), white line art, purple accents, ultra-bold headlines, 44 px subtitles, a top capsule HUD and a bottom chapter bar. Anything beyond the backdrop means editing reference/style-guide.md and src/ui.tsx. Every animation is a pure function of the frame number with seeded randomness, so re-renders are identical.

Length, time and disk

LengthEnglish wordsShotsBuild agentsWall clock
2-3 min280-42024-324-6about 1 h
3-5 min420-70040-508about 2 h
5-8 min700-115060-8010-14about 2-3 h

Plan on 2-3 GB of disk per film and keep at least 5 GB free while several agents bundle Remotion at once. Past about 12 tmux panes, dispatch the build in waves.

Voices

Defaults: kokoro-82m am_liam for English (local, CPU), edge-tts zh-CN-YunxiNeural for Chinese (a cloud call to Microsoft). To bring your own voice, put the audio at public/assets/<slug>/audio.wav and fill src/common/timeline.ts and subs.ts as described at the top of tts_build.py. On Linux or a Raspberry Pi, where kokoro is hard to install, set TTS_ENGINE=kokoro_onnx, TTS_ENGINE=piper or TTS_ENGINE=edge, and point Remotion at system Chromium with REMOTION_BROWSER_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/chromium.

Driving the template by hand

template/scripts/new_project.sh ~/work/my-video myslug makes a project; then python3 scripts/tts_build.py for the voice, python3 scripts/render_storyboard.py for the storyboard, scripts/preview.sh 30 for the first 30 seconds, and VER=v1 scripts/render.sh plus python3 scripts/frame_metrics.py for the full render and its checks.

The licence

The toolkit is PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0: free for noncommercial use, commercial use only with the author's prior permission, which he discusses by email. The videos belong to whoever makes them. The bundled fonts are SIL OFL 1.1, and Remotion has its own licence terms for companies (remotion.dev/license).

Use when

Not for

Install

anything2explainer: questions and answers

Can I use it for a monetized channel, paid courses or client work?

Only with permission: the toolkit is PolyForm Noncommercial. The author asks for an email that says who would use it, what you will make and how it earns, and agrees terms privately (#6, #12). The videos you make are yours either way.

Does it run on Windows?

Partly. A Windows 11 user scaffolded, test-rendered and exported a project, but the shell scripts needed workarounds (#16); portability fixes have landed since. You need Git Bash, Python 3, Node.js and ffmpeg, and a full Windows render is not verified yet.

Rendering fails on a small machine.

Render concurrency is fixed (6 in the shell scripts, 4 in the Python checks) and Remotion refuses to start with more workers than CPU cores. Lower it, for example CONC=2 scripts/render.sh; a fix that adapts to the core count is open (#20).

Can it make vertical Shorts or TikToks?

No. The template and its safe areas assume 1280x720 landscape.

Does it need a GPU or a paid API?

No. Remotion renders in headless Chromium on the CPU and kokoro runs locally; the agent itself (Claude Code or Codex) is the only paid part.

Which agents does it work with?

It has been run with Claude Code and Codex. It is a plain SKILL.md folder plus a Remotion project, so another agent that reads skill folders and runs shell commands should follow it, untested.

Alternatives to anything2explainer

Guide written by varg from the Yihao (Vincentwei1021) source, checked 2026-11-13.

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