_{🎬 Trailer: Bilibili  ·  YouTube}

What is DramaClaw?

DramaClaw is an industrialized drama-production line whose source is available. Drop in a manuscript and DramaClaw takes over all the heavy lifting: extracting characters, planning episodes, generating scripts, drawing storyboards and first frames, synthesizing voice-over, and cutting the final film.

It's built for creators, indie studios, and creative engineers — letting you run the whole "drama factory" on your own infrastructure, without stitching together a dozen disconnected tools or handing your material to an opaque black-box cloud service.

And although it's built around drama production, the same pipeline — characters, assets, scripts, storyboards, voice-over, and compositing — carries just as well to other visual-content formats: short-form ads, e-commerce product videos, and interactive otome (romance) games.

Core Capabilities

• Novel parsing & story graph — parse the manuscript into a queryable graph of characters, relationships, and timeline
• Asset Library & identity consistency — unified management of characters, scenes, props and voices; keep stable identities across episodes, generate character portraits and per-episode variants
• Episode planning & narrative pacing — automatic chapter segmentation, beat planning, multi-episode arcs
• Script generation — multiple modes (adaptive, literal, staged) with review / repair loops
• Storyboards & first frames — beat-driven stylized image generation, grid splitting, image-pool selection
  
• Voice-over synthesis — emotion-aware speech synthesis, switchable across providers
• Video composition & export — assemble episodes, export video + subtitle files and the full asset pack
• Freezone (infinite canvas) — node-based visual workbench: drag in project assets to generate images / video / audio, promote satisfying candidates back to the main line; the main pipeline and canvas exploration run as dual tracks
  
• Director World / 3GS (scene variants) — a framable virtual set that locks spatial structure, character blocking and camera placement to keep the same location consistent across shots
  
• Xia Director (AI assistant) — conversational production assistant that checks project progress, advances script / shot tasks, audits deliverable completeness and suggests next steps
  
• Visual Style (style templates) — upload a reference image to auto-extract style parameters and apply them across the whole project for a consistent look
• Task Center — status, progress, logs and cancel / retry for background generation tasks, with resume-from-checkpoint for long runs

Pipeline at a Glance

Every step has its own interface — run them in order, skip steps, resume from any checkpoint, or even plug in your own orchestrator.

System Requirements

DramaClaw runs all inference through a remote OpenAI-compatible gateway — nothing runs models on your machine — so the local footprint is light. An ordinary laptop or a small VPS is enough.

Item	Requirement
CPU / RAM	≥ 2 vCPU / 4 GB recommended (excludes model inference — that runs on the gateway)
GPU	Not required for the standard pipeline. Only the optional world extra (voxel / panorama-to-3D) needs a GPU + CUDA image
Disk	A few GB for images plus generated media/state under the ce-data volume (no hard minimum)
OS	macOS (Apple Silicon / Intel), Windows (Docker Desktop + WSL2 backend), Linux (Docker Engine + compose plugin)
Docker	Docker + docker compose
Ports	8080 web UI · 8780 REST API · 3000 bundled gateway (self-hosted variant only)
Datastores	None required — no Postgres, Redis, Celery or Ray. Tasks run in-process; state lives on the local filesystem (SQLite + files)
Network	Outbound access to the model gateway (official relayclaw.cdnfg.com, or your own BYO endpoint)

Local development (non-Docker) additionally needs Python 3.11–3.12 + uv + ffmpeg. Full prerequisites in the Self-hosting guide.

Quick Start

Docker (recommended)

git clone https://github.com/dramaclaw/dramaclaw.git
cd dramaclaw

cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env — set PROMPT_EXPORT_PASSWORD to a non-default value.
# NEWAPI_BASE_URL defaults to the official gateway; add your DC key here or paste it in the UI next.

docker compose up -d --build   # starts two services: api / web

Open the app at http://localhost:8080; the REST API is at http://localhost:8780. In Settings → Model Config → Official, paste your DC key (get one at https://relayclaw.cdnfg.com) and you're ready — no model mapping needed. Full steps in the Quick Start.

No build needed — every GitHub Release publishes multi-arch (amd64/arm64) images to Docker Hub, so a single file is enough to run:

curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dramaclaw/dramaclaw/main/docker-compose.release.yml
docker compose -f docker-compose.release.yml up -d
# Pin a version (defaults to latest): DRAMACLAW_VERSION=1.0.1 docker compose -f docker-compose.release.yml up -d

Local development (uv + Python 3.11+)

git clone https://github.com/dramaclaw/dramaclaw.git
cd dramaclaw

uv sync
cp .env.example .env && $EDITOR .env

uv run novelvideo api --port 8780   # start the REST API (CE defaults to inline tasks, no Ray/Redis)

Supported Models & Providers

DramaClaw stays model-neutral — all text/image/video/audio models connect through a single OpenAI-compatible gateway, in two ways:

• DramaClaw official key (recommended): docker compose up, open http://localhost:8080 → Settings → Model Config → Official, paste your DC key, save. Works instantly — no model mapping needed. Get a key at https://relayclaw.cdnfg.com.
• Bring your own gateway (BYO): point NEWAPI_BASE_URL at your own OpenAI-compatible endpoint and map model names (see Configuring Models).

Prefer fully local? Run docker compose -f docker-compose.selfhosted.yml up for a bundled newapi gateway you configure yourself (prebuilt-image variant: docker-compose.selfhosted.release.yml).

Stage	Connected via gateway
Text / LLM	via OpenAI-compatible gateway (DramaClaw official key, or BYO)
Image	gpt-image · nano-banana
Video	Seedance 1.0 / 1.5 / 2.0 series · happyhorse
Voice-over	IndexTTS2
Story graph	Cognee
Task runtime	in-process inline (no Ray / Redis / Celery)
Storage	local filesystem

Why DramaClaw?

Built for novel-to-short-drama. General workflow tools can wire nodes together, but they don't know what an "episode beat" is, don't understand why a character's cross-scene identity consistency matters, and won't guard a chapter's emotional arc across image + voice + editing. DramaClaw builds all that judgment into the tool.

Every step is decomposable. Each stage is an independent async task with its own interface. Run sequentially, skip steps, resume mid-way — the toolchain itself is the product, with no hidden black box.

Self-hostable, model-neutral. Your manuscript, your characters, your models, your servers. Use closed-source frontier models when you want the best results; switch to open-weight models when you want full control. DramaClaw won't lock you into any single vendor.

How DramaClaw compares

The edge isn't "more generation" — it's organizing the whole short-drama production loop (script → assets → shots → canvas → final cut) into something reusable, collaborative and scalable.

_{Legend: ✅ Full · ◐ Partial · ○ Planned · ❌ None — competitor names partially masked; comparison based on publicly available product docs and positioning.}

Capability	L*TV	R*Hub	T*Now	S*ko	U*dream	O*II	J*/K*	DramaClaw
Storyboard preview (script→shots, boards)	◐	✅	◐	✅	◐	❌	❌	✅
Interactive series (multi-episode, branching, IP)	◐	◐	◐	✅	◐	❌	❌	✅
Asset library (characters/scenes/props/voices)	◐	❌	◐	✅	◐	○	❌	✅
Scene consistency (variants, 360°, multi-state)	✅	◐	❌	❌	○	❌	❌	✅
Director's world (360°/3D set, camera, framing)	✅	◐	❌	❌	◐	❌	❌	✅
Final delivery (multi-shot, subtitles/SRT, pack)	✅	○	○	✅	✅	❌	❌	✅
Team production (sharing, roles, tasks, cost)	✅	✅	○	✅	○	○	○	✅
Infinite canvas (node-based, free exploration)	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅
Dual-track (main pipeline + canvas exploration)	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	✅
Custom style (templates, prompts, negatives)	✅	◐	○	✅	◐	○	◐	✅
Built-in agent (assistant, skills, suggestions)	✅	✅	✅	○	✅	○	✅	✅
Creative companion (persona, nudges, feedback)	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	✅
Source-available (self-host, fork, customize)	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	✅

Documentation

• Product user manual — full UI walkthrough (Feishu)
• Feature overview
• Architecture
• Quick Start
• Self-hosting guide
• Configuring model providers
• More docs →

Join the Community / Contribute

• Report a Bug
• Request a Feature
• Join the Discussion
• Contributing Guide
• Security Policy

We continuously curate and label good first issue — a great place to start.

Contributors

The people building DramaClaw — thank you. 💜

bopy-zou	Handanhhhy	Hanlin-Gabriel	ryanhuang-duat	lywaterman	n7s4
NewYuee	SimonRen	vkiki	wangwenqq	zhen2025109

Produced By

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License

Elastic License 2.0. Free to use, modify, and redistribute — the only restriction is that you may not resell the software as a hosted service. See the license explainer.

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Notices

See NOTICE for required branding and third-party attribution notices.