anything2explainer: a topic in, a sourced, narrated explainer out (non-commercial licence)
A Claude Code / Codex skill that researches a topic with sources, writes and voices the narration, then sends parallel agents to draw every shot in Remotion. Check the licence before any client work.
anything2explainer by Vincent Wei had about 2.5K GitHub stars when we checked on Oct 15 2026. It's not a CLI. It's the whole method an agent needs to finish a film: a Remotion template, a library of primitives and lighting, voiceover, storyboard, render and QC tooling, written style specs, a multi-agent protocol, and one complete reference film as the quality bar. The output is a 1280×720 H.264 MP4 in English or Chinese, with voiceover, word-aligned subtitles, chapter cards and a progress bar. There's no stock footage and no generative video. Every on-screen fact is meant to trace back to a sourced research doc.
The pipeline, which Alex To Go Eng's walkthrough also covers, has a research agent, then narration and a frame-accurate timeline, then a storyboard, then parallel build agents writing one Remotion component per shot, then QC agents per chapter. You're consulted at four checkpoints: length and language; narration sign-off, which freezes the frame counts; voice engine (local Kokoro, Volcengine, or bring your own); and a 30-second pilot to judge the look.
The timing rules are a nice detail. Sentences get 10 frames between them, and paragraph ends get 30, which is also where the cut lands, so pauses line up with picture changes. The finished video runs 5–8% longer than the raw speech by design. Because subtitles are locked to word boundaries, trimming the MP4 afterward breaks sync, so do your edits in the text.
Budget for it. The README puts 2–3 minutes at 4–6 build agents and about an hour, and 5–8 minutes at up to 14 agents, 2–3 hours and about 3GB of disk. You'll need Node 18+, FFmpeg and a Python venv. The walkthrough adds that it's RAM-hungry and has no incremental resume, so an interrupted build restarts the affected shots.
Licence: the toolkit is PolyForm Noncommercial. Its notice says videos you make belong to you, but any commercial use of the toolkit needs the author's prior authorisation. (The walkthrough also mentions a three-person limit. That rule is Remotion's licence, not this one.) An unofficial anything2explainer-lite fork claims a much cheaper token profile under the same non-commercial licence. We haven't tested either.