🎬 Visual Skills — AI Film Director for Your Movie

Two Claude Skills that turn your agent into a working film crew: video writes AI video prompts the way a director, screenwriter and editor would; image writes image prompts the way an art director would. Both pick the right model for the task, apply its exact syntax, and return a copy-paste-ready prompt.

Most prompting guides teach you syntax. This one teaches your agent cinema — and that is what makes it the strongest tool available for directing AI video.

Dramaturgy first, syntax second

[!IMPORTANT] Model syntax is worth nothing until the dramaturgy is there. Editing, staging, camera, light, the objects allowed in frame — hard rules, all of them written into the skill. That is what makes it a director instead of an autocomplete for adjectives. Get them right and the model finally has something worth rendering; get them wrong and no amount of correct syntax saves the shot.

The heart of the video skill is video/references/dramaturgy.md — how films are actually built, compressed into rules an agent can execute on a 5-30 second clip. Same idea, both columns below. Only one of them can be filmed.

[!CAUTION] Banned everywhere: cinematic · epic · stunning · masterpiece · beautiful lighting · dynamic camera · he is sad. Each one is a placeholder for a detail the writer failed to invent, and not one of them renders.

None of this is advice the agent is free to skip. dramaturgy.md loads before any model file, and the output is gated twice on the way out — the six-point dramaturgy check and a three-detail audit on every shot. A prompt that fails either one is not returned.

Supported models

Model files are updated as new versions ship — Seedance 2.5 has a dedicated production reference built from ByteDance’s official guides of July 31, 2026 (30-second single-pass clips, 60s extension, 30-180s Ultra Long mode, 50 reference inputs, video editing, 3D camera blockout); Kling 3.0 Turbo and Omni and Nano Banana 2 Lite are already in.

How the video skill works

The SKILL.md body is a thin router; the craft lives in reference files the agent is forced to load in order:

1. Dramaturgy (dramaturgy.md) — scene formula, beats, shot functions, rhythm.
2. Universal rules (universal-rules.md) — the 12 rules that hold for every model: prompt skeleton, character anchors, show-don’t-tell, duration discipline, the final-image rule.
3. One model file — seedance.md, kling.md or veo.md: exact syntax, multi-shot markers, dialogue protocols, reference tags, failure modes with fixes.
4. Task modules when needed — storyboards and role modes, animatic keyframes, race-and-speed grammar, genre patterns, prompt-fix skeletons, camera and lighting vocabulary.
5. Two mandatory checks before output — the six-point dramaturgy check and the three-detail audit on every shot. A prompt that fails either does not ship.

Output formats: a single prompt, a stitched multi-clip sequence with continuity blocks, a storyboard table, a prompt audit (“what breaks, what’s missing, stronger version”), a director treatment, or Veo JSON.

What the image skill does

Art direction for still images: editorial and product photography, posters, UI mockups, infographics, edits with hard preservation, character continuity across a series, storyboards and animatic keyframes for the video pipeline. It picks between Nano Banana and GPT Image 2 per task (grounding of real places, extreme aspect ratios and cheap batches go to Nano Banana; dense text, brand assets and preservation-critical edits go to GPT Image 2), then writes the prompt in that model’s native structure.

The two skills chain: image builds the character sheets and keyframes, video turns them into motion with a proper motion brief instead of a re-described scene.

Works with creative-director

These skills shoot the film. The idea and the script come from their sibling skill — creative-director: an AI creative director that develops ideas and scripts for commercials (and far beyond advertising) with world-class ideation methodologies, recursive scoring and a library of 571 legendary campaigns.

The full pipeline: idea & script (creative-director) → keyframes & stills (image) → motion (video). Each stage is optional — enter wherever your project starts.

Install

Works in Claude Code, Claude.ai Projects, Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, OpenCode, Codex, Hermes — anything that reads the Agent Skills format (plain markdown, no lock-in).

Via skills.sh — installs into any of 70+ supported agents, Codex included:

npx skills add smixs/visual-skills          # asks where to install, offers both skills
npx skills add smixs/visual-skills -g       # globally, for all projects
npx skills add smixs/visual-skills@video    # just one of the two
npx skills update                           # update to latest

The full Creative Agency pack — creative-director, image and video in one command:

npx skills add https://skills.sh/p/nuK9jo3sTCZGB2Ul

As a Claude Code plugin — one managed bundle with both skills:

/plugin marketplace add smixs/visual-skills
/plugin install visual-skills@visual-skills

In Codex CLI — npx skills add smixs/visual-skills -g -a codex, or ask the built-in installer: $skill-installer install skills from https://github.com/smixs/visual-skills.

Manually:

git clone https://github.com/smixs/visual-skills.git
cp -r visual-skills/video visual-skills/image ~/.claude/skills/

Usage

“Write a Seedance prompt — a hungry guy at night finds the last sausage in the fridge, 5 seconds, multi-shot”

“Storyboard a 30-second film about guilt. Core emotion — guilt. Anchor object — a phone with an unread message.”

“Audit this prompt: […]. What’s broken, how to fix?”

“Translate this script into 6 × 5-second Seedance prompts.”

“Make a keyframe set for a 15-second product film, then Kling prompts to animate each”

What’s new

Author

Serge Shima — t.me/aimastersme · sergeshima.com · aimasters.me

Credits

Dramaturgy distilled from Walter Murch (In the Blink of an Eye), Akira Kurosawa, David Fincher, Steven Spielberg, Jonathan Glazer and Bong Joon Ho. Model syntax verified against official ByteDance, Kuaishou, Google and OpenAI docs plus fal.ai prompting guides, July 2026.

Vendor marks in the model table come from lobe-icons (MIT). Each mark stays the property of its owner and is used here only to identify the model it labels.

License

CC BY 4.0 — use it, fork it, build on it, commercially too. One rule: credit the author. Any copy or derivative — including skills assembled by AI agents from these files — must keep the attribution line: Serge Shima — github.com/smixs/visual-skills. See LICENSE and NOTICE.

Tags: claude · claude-skills · ai-video-generation · ai-image-generation · seedance · kling · veo · nano-banana · gpt-image-2 · ai-film-directing · storyboard · prompt-engineering