Turn Any Article Into Short AI Videos With This Claude Skill

If you’ve got existing articles and want to repurpose them as short video content without manually scripting and producing every clip, this Claude skill does that job in one run. It reads any article, identifies the moments worth animating, picks a visual style, and generates finished MP4 clips — ready to use.

Here’s the full setup and what the workflow actually looks like in practice.

What the Skill Does

The skill takes an article as input, analyzes it, and proposes two to five video moments — the specific passages that translate well to short visual explainers. You choose a visual style (whiteboard animation, motion graphics, and similar options), optionally approve keyframes, and the skill generates the video clips using either the KIE API or the Gemini API.

The output is a sequence of MP4 files. Each clip covers one moment from the article, with voiceover and animation. They’re designed to be combinable — you can use them individually as standalone shorts or chain them into a longer explainer piece.

The skill file is named explainer-section-videos.skill. If you want to inspect what’s inside before installing, rename the extension to .zip — it unpacks like a normal archive and contains the instruction files, scripts, and reference files the skill uses.

Installation in Claude

1. Open Claude (web or desktop version)
2. Go to Customize, then Skills
3. Click the + icon and choose Upload Skill
4. Upload the .skill file

After installation, you can see the skill listed and browse its internal files directly in the UI. The description field is what matters most — it defines the conditions under which Claude will automatically trigger the skill.

You can activate it in three ways:

• Type / and select the skill from the list
• Write a prompt that matches the skill’s trigger description — Claude picks it up automatically
• Ask Claude directly to use it

One practical note on token usage: every active skill’s description gets loaded into context. If you have many skills installed, this adds up. Keep only the skills you’re actively using switched on, and deactivate the rest. Fifty skills is fine. Two hundred active skills will burn tokens on every single conversation.

Installation in Other Tools

The same .skill file works across multiple agent platforms.

Manus: Click Plugins → Create → Upload a Skill → select the file.

Agentic Flow: Create an Assistant (similar to a custom GPT, but with agentic capabilities), switch on Skills, then upload the new skill.

The trigger logic works the same way across all three: the skill activates when your prompt matches its description, or when you call it explicitly.

The Workflow Step by Step

Once you give Claude the article content, here’s what happens:

Step 1 — Analysis. Claude reads the article and identifies two to five moments that work as short explainer clips. It presents these as options with suggested visual styles.

Step 2 — Style selection. You choose the visual approach. Options include whiteboard animation and motion graphic styles. You also confirm the overall look and voiceover direction at this stage.

Step 3 — Keyframes (optional). Claude can generate keyframe descriptions before producing the final video. This step is skippable if you want to go straight to output.

Step 4 — Video generation. The skill calls either the KIE API or the Gemini API to render the clips. KIE is the recommended path — it’s cheaper and avoids some rate-limiting issues you can hit with direct Gemini calls.

Step 5 — MP4 output. The finished clips are returned and ready to download.

Getting a KIE API Key

KIE is the video generation backend the skill uses by default. Getting a key is straightforward:

1. Log into the KIE platform
2. Go to API Keys
3. Create a new key and copy it

You can paste the key directly into the Claude chat when the skill requests it. For a more permanent setup with a desktop Claude installation, there’s a configuration path that avoids pasting keys into conversations — that’s worth setting up if you plan to use the skill regularly.

What the Output Actually Looks Like

The clips are short, combinable explainer videos. The voiceover timing should match the animation, though you may want to verify the sync on the first render before committing to a full batch.

The skill works best when the source article has clear, distinct ideas — the kind of content that breaks naturally into standalone points. Dense, single-argument pieces are harder to segment. Listicles, how-to guides, explainers, and multi-point breakdowns are the sweet spot.

Where to Get the Skill

The skill is available in the AI Agent Lab community. That’s also where updates will land and where you can ask questions about the workflow.

Check it out and grab the skill → AI Agent Lab