video

Trigger phrases

Phrases that activate this skill when typed to Claude Code:

• video production
• AI video
• Remotion
• talking head video
• make me a video

What it does

video is a Claude Code skill from Corey Haines’s marketing-skills repo. It turns Claude into a video producer who picks the right tool per use-case — Veo / Kling / Runway / Sora for AI-generated B-roll, HeyGen / Synthesia for avatar talking-heads, Remotion or Hyperframes for templated programmatic video, ElevenLabs / Cartesia for voiceover. The skill activates when you mention “video production”, “AI video”, “Remotion”, “talking head”, or “make me a video”.

The output of a session is a video plan: tool selection per segment (avatar, B-roll, motion graphics, voiceover), prompt structures for each AI generation step, Remotion template scope if you’re going programmatic, and a cost/time estimate before you spend hours rendering.

When to use it

Reach for it when:

• You need a product demo or explainer and don’t have video resources
• You’re producing social clips at scale and want a templated pipeline (Remotion)
• You need talking-head avatar video for an explainer without filming yourself

When not to reach for it:

• The video has to feature a real human’s actual face for trust reasons
• You’re hand-editing a single hero piece; pro tools beat AI for premium one-offs

Install

The skill is distributed via Corey Haines’s marketing-skills repo. Install via the repo’s recommended path — copy the video SKILL.md into your project’s .claude/skills/video/ directory, or use the repo’s plugin install if you’ve set it up.

Once installed, the skill activates on the trigger phrases above. The first time it runs, it will check for .agents/product-marketing-context.md (or .claude/product-marketing-context.md) — populating that file with your product context first dramatically improves output quality across all of Haines’s marketing skills.

What a session looks like

A typical session has three phases:

1. Use-case + tool fit. Demo / explainer / social clip / ad / programmatic? Each maps to a different toolchain. The skill picks instead of listing five options.
2. Pipeline design. For programmatic: Remotion template scope, data input, render cost estimate. For AI-generated: prompt structures and tool sequencing (script → voiceover → avatar → B-roll → composition).
3. Cost + time check. Rendering AI video at scale gets expensive fast; the skill estimates before you start so the budget is real.

The discipline that makes it work: matching tool to use-case. Asking Veo to render a templated thumbnail is wasteful; asking Remotion to render lifelike humans is futile. Tool fit is the entire game.

Receipts

Honest reporting on what video produces and where it has limits:

Where it works well:

• The tool-fit decision saves the “I tried Runway, Kling, and HeyGen and got mediocre results in all three” loop
• Cost estimate up front is genuinely useful — AI video burns budget invisibly
• Remotion-pipeline scope for templated video at scale is the highest-leverage pattern

Where it backfires:

• AI video quality shifts every few months; prompt structures need ongoing tuning
• Avatar-tool talking heads are good but still readable as AI to careful viewers; brand-trust use-cases need real video

Pattern that works: use AI video for repurposing and scale (variations, social clips, explainers), reserve real video for the moments that need a face. The split keeps both volume and trust high.

Source and attribution

Originally written by Corey Haines. The canonical SKILL.md and any supporting files live in the video folder of his marketing-skills repository.

License: MIT. You can install, adapt, and redistribute the skill, with attribution preserved.

This page documents the skill from a practitioner’s perspective. For the formal spec and any updates, defer to the source repo.