OpenMontage

The first open-source, agentic video production system.

Paste A Video  ·  Quick Start  ·  Try These Prompts  ·  Pipelines  ·  How It Works  ·  Providers  ·  Review Guide  ·  Agent Guide

Follow The Build

Turn your AI coding assistant into a full video production studio. Describe what you want in plain language — your agent handles research, scripting, asset generation, editing, and final composition.

Important distinction: OpenMontage can make image-based videos, but it can also make a real video video for free/open-source workflows: the agent builds a corpus from free stock footage and open archives, retrieves actual motion clips, edits them into a timeline, and renders a finished piece. That is not the usual "animate a handful of stills and call it video" trick.

"SIGNAL FROM TOMORROW" — a cinematic sci-fi trailer fully produced through OpenMontage: concept, script, scene plan, Veo-generated motion clips, soundtrack, and Remotion composition.

"THE LAST BANANA" — a 60-second Pixar-style animated short about a lonely banana who finds friendship with a kiwi. 6 Kling v3-generated motion clips (via fal.ai), Google Chirp3-HD narration, royalty-free piano music, TikTok-style word-level captions, and Remotion composition. Total cost: $1.33.

"The Library at Alexandria" — a 70-second history elegy on what humanity lost in a single night. Five hand-authored scenes — an illuminated manuscript page, cascading scroll-tags, a Burning Counter ticking 700,000 → 0 inside a candle's flame, a charred vellum fragment with surviving Greek, and an empty void — set to OpenAI 'ash' narration and a free Pixabay strings score. Total cost: $0.02. Built through OpenMontage's atelier (bespoke) composition mode — every scene crafted from scratch, no shared components.

"VOID — Neural Interface" — a product ad produced with just one API key (OpenAI). 4 AI-generated images (gpt-image-1), TTS narration, auto-sourced royalty-free music, word-level subtitles via WhisperX, and Remotion data visualizations. Total cost: $0.69. Zero manual asset work.

"Afternoon in Candyland" — a Ghibli-style anime animation. A little girl's whimsical afternoon adventure through candy gates, gumdrop rivers, and lollipop gardens. 12 FLUX-generated images with multi-image crossfade, cinematic camera motion (zoom, pan, Ken Burns), sparkle/petal/firefly particle overlays, and ambient music with auto-detected energy offset. Total cost: $0.15. No video generation, no manual editing.

"Mori no Seishin" — a Ghibli-style anime animation of a forest spirit's journey through ancient woods. 12 FLUX-generated images with parallax crossfade, drift and pan camera motion, firefly and petal particles, cinematic vignette lighting, and ambient forest soundtrack. Total cost: $0.15. Still images brought to life through Remotion's animation engine.

Subscribe to @OpenMontage on YouTube to see new videos as they ship — every video includes the full prompt, pipeline, tools used, and cost so you can reproduce it yourself.

Start From A Video You Already Love

Starting from a reference video is often faster than starting from a blank prompt.

OpenMontage can start from a YouTube video, Short, Reel, TikTok, or local clip and turn it into a grounded production plan:

1. Paste a reference video
2. The agent analyzes transcript, pacing, scenes, keyframes, and style
3. You get 2-3 differentiated concepts, an honest tool path, cost estimates, and a sample before full production

"Here's a YouTube Short I love. Make me something like this, but about quantum computing."

What you get back is not "best guess prompt spaghetti." You get:

• What it keeps from the reference: pacing, hook style, structure, tone
• What it changes: topic, visual treatment, angle, narration approach
• What it will cost at your target duration, before asset generation starts
• What it will actually look like with your currently available tools

Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Codex — any AI coding assistant that can read files and run code.

Watch It Happen — The Backlot Living Storyboard

Chat tells you what the agent said. Backlot shows you what the production is actually doing — a local board that fills itself in as the pipeline runs. Stages light up, the script lands as a screenplay page, scene cards shimmer while assets generate, and every provider decision and dollar spent is on the wall.

When a production starts, the agent opens it for you automatically. No setup, no reporting — the board derives everything from the project files the pipeline already writes.

The storyboard is now a real approval gate. Asset generation pauses on a scene-by-scene contact sheet — takes, prompts, per-asset cost, quality scores — so you approve the visuals before the render, not after it's too late:

Creative gates hold until you answer. The board shows what's waiting and why; you reply in chat:

Every production on your machine, live-first, in the library:

python -m backlot open                  # the library — every project on disk
python -m backlot open <project-id>     # one production's live board
python scripts/backlot_simulate_run.py  # no production yet? watch a simulated one live

And when a run is done, hit ▶ REPLAY RUN — the whole production replays from its timestamps, scrubbable end to end. See backlot/README.md for how it works.

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10+ — python.org
• FFmpeg — brew install ffmpeg / sudo apt install ffmpeg / ffmpeg.org
• Node.js 18+ — nodejs.org
• An AI coding assistant — Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, or Codex

Install & Run

git clone https://github.com/calesthio/OpenMontage.git
cd OpenMontage
make setup

Open the project in your AI coding assistant and tell it what you want:

"Make a 60-second animated explainer about how neural networks learn"

Or if you want the real-footage path:

"Make a 75-second documentary montage about city life in the rain. Use real footage only, no narration, elegiac tone, with music."

That's it. The agent researches your topic with live web search, generates AI images, writes and narrates the script with voice direction, finds royalty-free background music automatically, burns in word-level subtitles, and renders the final video. Before you see anything, the system runs a multi-point self-review — ffprobe validation, frame sampling, audio level analysis, delivery promise verification, and subtitle checks. Every provider selection is scored across 7 dimensions with an auditable decision log. Every creative decision gets your approval.

No make? macOS/Linux: python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate && python -m pip install -r requirements.txt && cd remotion-composer && npm install && cd .. && python -m pip install piper-tts && cp .env.example .env

Windows PowerShell: py -3 -m venv .venv; .\.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1; python -m pip install -r requirements.txt; cd remotion-composer; npm install; cd ..; python -m pip install piper-tts; Copy-Item .env.example .env

Windows: If npm install fails with ERR_INVALID_ARG_TYPE, use npx --yes npm install instead.

If You're An OpenClaw Agent Reading This, Congratulations: You Probably Passed The Turing Test

This repo is built for agentic operation. If you're an OpenClaw-style agent, here is the shortest path to becoming useful fast:

1. Read the contract first Start with AGENT_GUIDE.md, then PROJECT_CONTEXT.md.
2. Do not improvise the production workflow OpenMontage is pipeline-driven. Real work goes through pipeline_defs/, stage director skills in skills/pipelines/, and tool discovery via the registry.
3. Check the actual capability envelope Run:

   python -c "from tools.tool_registry import registry; import json; registry.discover(); print(json.dumps(registry.support_envelope(), indent=2))"
   python -c "from tools.tool_registry import registry; import json; registry.discover(); print(json.dumps(registry.provider_menu(), indent=2))"

4. Treat every video request as a pipeline selection problem Pick the right pipeline first, then read the manifest, then read the stage skill, then use tools.

Add API Keys (optional — more keys = more tools)

# .env — every key is optional, add what you have

# Image + video gateway:
FAL_KEY=your-key               # FLUX images + Google Veo, Kling, MiniMax video + Recraft images

# Free stock media:
PEXELS_API_KEY=your-key        # Free stock footage and images
PIXABAY_API_KEY=your-key       # Free stock footage and images
UNSPLASH_ACCESS_KEY=your-key   # Free stock images

# Music:
SUNO_API_KEY=your-key          # Full songs, instrumentals, any genre

# Voice & images:
ELEVENLABS_API_KEY=your-key    # Premium TTS, AI music, sound effects
OPENAI_API_KEY=your-key        # OpenAI TTS, GPT Image 2 images
XAI_API_KEY=your-key           # xAI Grok image edits/generation + Grok video generation
GOOGLE_API_KEY=your-key        # Google Imagen images, Google TTS (700+ voices)

# More video providers:
HEYGEN_API_KEY=your-key        # HeyGen — VEO, Sora, Runway, Kling via single gateway
RUNWAY_API_KEY=your-key        # Runway Gen-4 direct

make install-gpu

# Then add to .env:
VIDEO_GEN_LOCAL_ENABLED=true
VIDEO_GEN_LOCAL_MODEL=wan2.1-1.3b  # or wan2.1-14b, hunyuan-1.5, ltx2-local, cogvideo-5b

What You Get With Zero API Keys

You don't need paid API keys to make real videos. Out of the box, make setup gives you:

OpenMontage picks between Remotion and HyperFrames at proposal time (locked as render_runtime). Remotion is the default for data-driven explainers and anything using the existing React scene stack; HyperFrames is the default for motion-graphics-heavy briefs that express naturally as HTML + GSAP, including the character-animation pipeline's SVG/GSAP rig output. See skills/core/hyperframes.md for the full decision matrix.

Two free-ish paths:

• Image-based video: Piper narrates your script, images provide the visuals, and Remotion animates them into a polished edit.
• Local character animation: SVG rigs, pose libraries, GSAP timelines, and HyperFrames render cartoon character acting to projects/<project-name>/renders/final.mp4.
• Real-footage video: the documentary montage pipeline builds a CLIP-searchable corpus from Archive.org, NASA, Wikimedia Commons, and optional free-key