A Claude Code Skill that turns textbooks into narrated, interactive web lessons,
stories into paper-puppet films, and books into narrated documentaries.
Open the live bookshelf → · Read the Skill
| You give it | You get | On the shelf |
|---|---|---|
| A textbook PDF (maths) | Lessons where formulas and diagrams change step by step as the narration explains, with quick checks and chapter practice that grade the maths, not the string | Elementary Algebra (68 chapters), Elementary Mathematics (23) |
| A textbook PDF (science) | Illustrated scenes with acting characters and camera work, plus the same quizzes | Elementary Physics (9 chapters and a sample) |
| A story, a joke or a fairy tale | A short film of paper puppets in front of sets drawn in code or painted by an image model, with voices, subtitles, sound effects and music | Joke Collection (7 episodes), Little Red Riding Hood |
| A book or an idea | A narrated documentary of public-domain engravings, paintings and maps, moved in step with the voice, with music | Madness and Civilization (10 minutes) |
Everything is a static web page: no server, no database, no account. A book is a folder you can host anywhere.
Install the Skill in your project:
npx skills add DozenTwelve/Papermorph --skill papermorph --agent claude-codeThen, in Claude Code:
/papermorph
It finds the PDF in your project (or asks for your story), tells you what kind of book it is, suggests a chapter to try first and how much animation it needs, and offers a recommended option at every step. Your choices are saved in style.json, so every later chapter is made to the same style.
You need uv, ffmpeg, and Playwright's browsers (uv run --with playwright playwright install chromium firefox). Narration uses Edge TTS (online) or Kokoro (local), free. A few steps are paid, optional and need an API key: painted sets for picture books (OpenRouter or OpenAI), and ElevenLabs narration and clips made from a still for documentaries (OpenRouter). Everything else runs without one.
Textbooks: the PDF is split into chapters → each chapter gets a beat plan and narration → the narration is voiced, and every word gets a time → the picture is laid out as a storyboard first, then animated in time with those words → quizzes go between the steps → the model watches its own output (contact sheets, overlap and blank-frame checks, end-to-end tests) and fixes what it sees.
Picture books: your telling becomes a script and a shot list → puppets and sets are built (or painted) once and reused across episodes → voices, mouth shapes, sound effects and music are made and joined per scene → scenes are filmed in parallel → review rounds (a director, picture reviewers and a sound reviewer) send scenes back until they hold up next to approved episodes.
Documentaries: the source becomes an argument, a script and a storyboard → public-domain pictures are found, their licences recorded, and treated to one look → the narration is voiced and music laid under it → the beats are built in step with the words → a director pass checks every beat against the narration.
Large chapters can be made by a team of subagents, each step on the model that suits it (team.md).
Every book plays in the same player: pause anywhere, step back and forth, click a step to jump there, speed control, captions, keyboard shortcuts, and progress saved per book. Interface text follows the book's language (<html lang>: English, Russian, Chinese and Japanese are built in); foreign lines in a film are subtitled. Formulas can be written in LaTeX (MathJax, copied only into the books that use it).
The player engine lives in engine/, apart from the Skill, and every book keeps its own copy, so a book never breaks when the engine changes. To update the books, or to use your own fork:
python3 .claude/skills/papermorph/scripts/engine.py site # sync every book in site/
python3 .claude/skills/papermorph/scripts/engine.py site --from you/your-fork@mainEngine versions are tags (engine-v2, engine-v2.1, …); a new major number means a book may need a change, described in its release notes. Outside this repository, engine.py syncs from the latest compatible release, now engine-v2.4. Since engine-v2 the maths helpers (number lines, tiles, planes, the number-set diagram) are in lib/math.js: a chapter that uses them loads ../lib/math.js right after engine.js, and lint.py names the chapters that need it. --from DozenTwelve/Papermorph@engine-v1 keeps the earlier engine.
With the site served locally, any chapter or episode renders to a 1080p MP4 with an .srt:
uv run --with playwright --with numpy .claude/skills/papermorph/scripts/export.py ch12 \
--url http://localhost:8765/science/ --link https://papermorph.diamonddoge.org/science/ch12/Frames are rendered from the lesson clock, so the video matches the page exactly; quizzes stay in the interactive version, and the video ends by pointing there.
For courses, a book can also be packaged for an LMS as SCORM 1.2 or 2004 (scripts/scorm.py), and a book can opt in to verified citation links and reviewed question banks (authoring.md). None of this is on by default.
The Skill is not tied to one model: the books on the shelf were made with Opus 5.5, GPT-6.1-Sol and Sonnet 5.5.
An illustrated physics chapter costs about $10–18 of model usage. The painted sets of a picture-book episode cost under $0.20.
Ticked items are in the Skill today. The Skill currently goes as far as widescreen documentaries.
- Maths books: formulas and diagrams that change step by step, with quizzes.
- Science books: illustrated scenes, acting characters, camera work.
- Picture books: paper-puppet films from a story, a joke or a fairy tale.
- Choosing the model for every step, with defaults that depend on how much animation a book needs.
- Documentaries: narrated films of public-domain pictures about a book or an idea. Madness and Civilization on the shelf is the reference film.
- Vertical shorts of documentaries.
How is this different from Claude Motion? Claude Motion makes animated explainers. Papermorph makes whole books: many chapters in one consistent style, quizzes that are graded, progress that is saved, and a static site you own and can host anywhere.
Can I make a book from any PDF? Yes, for your own use. The finished book contains new explanations and drawings, not the PDF's pages, but publishing a book based on someone else's textbook is your call to check.
Fixes to the Skill and the player are welcome. Please don't open pull requests that add a copyrighted book, its PDF, or lessons made from one.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/DozenTwelve/Papermorph.git
cd Papermorph
python3 .claude/skills/papermorph/scripts/serve.py 8765 siteThen open localhost:8765. (The full history is large; --depth 1 skips it.)
MIT. The bundled MathJax (engine/vendor/mathjax) is under the Apache License 2.0.