Make a Crayon Storybook Animation
Describe a story and get a warm picture-book animation as an MP4: waxy crayon fills on cream paper, coloured-pencil outlines, page turns and hand-lettered captions.
Install the skill or give me an instruction how to install it - crayon-storybook from https://github.com/edenfunf/reelmimic Free Open source Works in Claude, Cursor, Codex & more
What it does
Give it a story brief and get back a 1920×1080 MP4 that looks like a children's picture book drawn by hand. Every shape is coloured in with waxy crayon strokes on cream drawing paper, outlined in coloured pencil, and re-drawn 8 times a second so the lines move the way hand-drawn frames do.
The agent writes a storyboard, then builds each shot from a drawing library of skies, hills, trees, houses and props, plus two original characters, Lulu and Kuri, who have 18 moods and act with anticipation, squash and follow-through. It renders contact sheets, frame strips and face crops, opens them to check its own work, and fixes what looks off before rendering every frame in headless Chrome and encoding with ffmpeg.
Scenes change with a page turn that curls the old page away from the corner, a crayon wipe, an iris or a fade to blank paper. Captions write on character by character in hand-lettered type on a torn paper label, and you can pass in an audio track when encoding.
When to use it
- You want a bedtime story as a short animated video
Hand over the story and get an MP4 with a storyboarded sequence of shots, acted characters and page turns between scenes, all in one crayon look.
- A reference video has a crayon or picture-book look
It gives the agent the fills, brushes, paper and page framing to draw a new video in that style, with original characters instead of anything from the reference.
- Your captions are in Chinese and should look hand-lettered
Captions use storybook lettering with a slightly uneven baseline, write on character by character at 74 px by default, and stay legible on a phone screen.
- You have your own character to put in a picture book
Provide a design sheet and the agent builds the character the same way as Lulu and Kuri, with crayon fills, attached limbs, drawn faces and at least three views.
FAQ
Does Crayon Storybook need an API key or an image model?
No. Crayon Storybook draws every frame with code, using p5.js and p5.brush in headless Chrome, so no image model is involved and its files ask for no key. You need Node, ffmpeg and Chrome installed, and a network connection for npm install and Google Fonts.
How long does it take to render?
About 150 to 250 ms per frame for wide shots, around 350 ms for busy medium shots, and 0.7 to 1 s during a page turn, measured on one worker with an RTX-class GPU. Crayon Storybook's guide puts throughput at about 0.45 s per frame with 4 workers.
Can I use my own characters instead of Lulu and Kuri?
Yes. Give it a design sheet of a character you own and the agent adds it to the cast using the same drawing approach. Characters must be original or your own, since the guide rules out existing IP.
Do I need the full ReelMimic app to use it?
No. The skill folder carries its own template and scaffold script, which sets up a project and installs p5, p5.brush and puppeteer-core. Rendering then runs from that project folder with one command for frames and one for the MP4.