UKIYO
ART & CINEMA
SHADOWPLAY
Shadow puppet theatre motion video
SHADOWPLAY is a free AI Skill for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor that renders a Chinese shadow puppet theatre motion video with gong, drum and fiddle synthesised in code. Chinese shadow theatre drawn in code: carved, dyed hide puppets glowing through a warm cotton screen under flickering oil lamps, dyes that shine, holes as the brightest value and overlaps that darken, with hand tremor, visible rods, operatic freezes, gong and drum and a nasal fiddle, rendered as an MP4, a poster and a contact sheet.
What's included
- An MP4 motion video, a poster, a contact sheet and an .srt
- 10 original recipes: transmission canvas, lamp compositor, carved piece sprite, flat-puppet roll, clapper freeze and more
- Dye and lamp rules, score and foley guidance, the full workflow and a QA checklist
Perfect for
- Brands telling a product or process story with cultural warmth
- Educators explaining a sequence step by step
- Creators making festival or heritage shorts
What you need
- Your topic and the points to make
- Video length and aspect ratio
- Claude Code, Codex or Cursor
FAQ
Paste it into Claude Code, Codex or Cursor and give it the one message and the brand name. The AI installs GSAP and the render tools, writes a storyboard and renders the MP4, a poster and a contact sheet frame by frame in your project folder. How Skills work
The dyes let light through, the cut-out holes are the brightest value and overlaps darken, all lit through a warm cotton screen by flickering oil lamps. The puppets carry a hand tremor, the rods stay visible and key moments freeze like an opera pose.
Yes. The Skill only uses open fonts licensed for commercial use (Noto Sans TC, Inter and others under the SIL Open Font License). Check the license before switching fonts.
No. The Skill runs inside your own AI tool, and the video is rendered on your own machine.
Yes. Create an account or sign in, then copy it from this page.