🎬 Visual Skills — AI Film Director for Your Movie

Two Claude Skills that turn your agent into a working film crew: video writes AI video prompts the way a director, screenwriter and editor would; image writes image prompts the way an art director would. Both pick the right model for the task, apply its exact syntax, and return a copy-paste-ready prompt.

Most prompting guides teach you syntax. This one teaches your agent cinema — and that is what makes it the strongest tool available for directing AI video.

Dramaturgy first, syntax second

[!IMPORTANT] Model syntax is worth nothing until the dramaturgy is there. Editing, staging, camera, light, the objects allowed in frame — hard rules, all of them written into the skill. That is what makes it a director instead of an autocomplete for adjectives. Get them right and the model finally has something worth rendering; get them wrong and no amount of correct syntax saves the shot.

The heart of the video skill is video/references/dramaturgy.md — how films are actually built, compressed into rules an agent can execute on a 5-30 second clip. Same idea, both columns below. Only one of them can be filmed.

cinematic shot of a man
in a kitchen at night,
epic lighting, moody
atmosphere, 4k

Emotion: hunger as loneliness. Object: last sausage.
Final image: fridge light dying on his face.

Shot 1 · 0.0-1.6s · wide, 24mm, static
Dark kitchen. He stands with one hand on the fridge
door, not opening it. Only the wall clock moves.

Cut · 1.6-3.4s · medium, 50mm, push-in
The push starts the frame he sees the shelf is empty
— that is what changed. Cold blue light, jaw sets,
one stomach growl, then nothing.

Cut · 3.4-5.0s · macro, 100mm
Two fingers close on the last sausage. Half-beat hold.
Door swings shut, the light dies on his face.

No desire, no obstacle, no geometry, no cut, no final image. The model picks all five for you — and picks differently on every run.

Every line is a physical fact a camera could record: a reason for the move, a body carrying the emotion, a sound, an object, an ending. Nothing left for the model to invent.

[!CAUTION] Banned everywhere: cinematic · epic · stunning · masterpiece · beautiful lighting · dynamic camera · he is sad. Each one is a placeholder for a detail the writer failed to invent, and not one of them renders.

0 1  ·  L A WThe scene formula

desire + obstacle + geometry + gaze + rhythm

Five elements. Name each one in a single sentence before a word of prompt is written: what the hero wants right now, what blocks it, who stands where, where the eye is forced to look, how long each shot lives. Anything less is decoration.

0 2  ·  D E T A I LThe Details Law

Every shot owns three physical facts: one environmental pressure (cold refrigerator light, wet asphalt), one micro-action of the body (jaw locks, knuckles whiten), one sound anchor or visual motif.

"He is sad" does not render. A jaw does.

0 3  ·  E D I T I N GWalter Murch's Rule of Six — where to cut, in priority order. Each item outweighs everything below it combined.

Cutting "for pace" is item three. Serving item three ahead of emotion and story is exactly how TikTok mush gets made — and it is the default behaviour of every model you will ever prompt.

0 4  ·  S E L E C T I O NThe three-jobs rule

A shot either changes emotion, advances action, or increases pressure. A shot that does none is deleted, however pretty it came out.

"Beautiful establishing shot" is not a job.

0 5  ·  S T A G I N GBlocking, camera, environment

Fincher — every camera move answers "what changed?", otherwise the camera is static. Spielberg — even in chaos the viewer knows where the hero, the threat and the exit are. Kurosawa — one weather, one pressure, carrying the whole scene.

0 6  ·  R H Y T H MMontage is a staircase

long → shorter → shorter → pause → impact

The pause before the hit matters more than the speed of the cuts. Beat maps for 15 / 30 / 60 / 90 seconds — Hook, Pressure, Crack, Impact, Aftermath. Never skip the Crack.

0 7  ·  S P E CThe shot card and the five anchors

Fourteen fields per storyboard row: framing, composition, camera, movement reason, eye-trace, duration, cut type, sound, light. An empty field is missing direction. Per piece, exactly five anchors — one emotion, one motif, one object, one break, one final image.

None of this is advice the agent is free to skip. dramaturgy.md loads before any model file, and the output is gated twice on the way out — the six-point dramaturgy check and a three-detail audit on every shot. A prompt that fails either one is not returned.

Supported models