Papermorph: a Claude skill that turns books into narrated films

What it is. Papermorph, from GitHub user DozenTwelve, has three tiers on one engine. Lessons come from a textbook PDF: the picture changes step by step as the narration explains, with quick checks inside the scene. Picture books come from a story or a joke: paper puppets in front of sets drawn in code or painted by an image model, with voices, sound effects and music. Films are narrated documentaries made from public-domain engravings, maps and charts, which can be recut into upright shorts of under three minutes for a phone feed. Every output is a static web page with no server or account, and per the README it can also be exported as video.

How it works. You install it with npx skills add DozenTwelve/Papermorph --skill papermorph and type /papermorph. The skill reads your PDF or asks for your story, suggests a chapter to start with, and saves your choices (look, voices, which model handles which step) to a style.json file, so later chapters match. Each chapter is an SVG stage, 1600x900 or 900x1600 for shorts, driven by 'beats' that pair narration clips with timed actions. The skill's own rules ask for a review round before anything is published, and it can split chapters across subagents.

What it costs. Per the README you need uv, ffmpeg and Playwright's browsers. Narration is free through Edge TTS (online) or Kokoro (local). Acted ElevenLabs voices, image-to-clip shots via OpenRouter and painted sets are optional paid steps, and the creator says its two newest picture books cost under $0.35 each in voices.

Rights. The code is MIT, but the pictures and recordings in the examples keep their own licences. The README says a book made from someone else's textbook is fine for personal use, but publishing it is your call to check. The skill re-creates explanations and drawings rather than copying pages, and keeps the source PDF out of the output.

Our take: this sits alongside the Claude Animated Shorts skill we covered this morning, as another skill that renders a whole format in code with no video model. Papermorph's documentary-to-shorts path is the part most relevant to video makers: one researched long-form film, recut into a run of vertical explainers, at close to zero generation cost. Browse the live bookshelf before installing to see whether the paper-cutout look suits your channel.