Papermorph

A Claude Code Skill that turns textbooks into narrated, interactive web lessons,and stories into paper-puppet films.

Open the live bookshelf → · Read the Skill

What you can make

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

Everything is a static web page: no server, no database, no account. A book is a folder you can host anywhere.

Get started

Install the Skill in your project:

npx skills add DozenTwelve/Papermorph --skill papermorph --agent claude-code

Then, 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). Painted sets for picture books need an image-model API key; everything else runs without one.

How it works

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.

Large chapters can be made by a team of subagents, each step on the model that suits it (team.md).

The player

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@main

Engine 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-v2.1. 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.

Video and LMS export

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.

Models and cost

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.

Roadmap

• 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: history and social-science titles.

FAQ

How is this different from Claude Motion? [Claude Motion](https://claude.com/resources/articles/da