free-scene

Multi-scene AI movie maker. Give it a story idea, get a stitched mp4.

$ freescene "A retired astronaut tends a rooftop garden in Tokyo, she finds a small alien plant. Tone: quiet, hopeful, Ghibli-esque."

─────────────────────────────── freescene ────────────────────────────────
Idea: A retired astronaut tends a rooftop garden in Tokyo, she finds a small alien plant. Tone: quiet, hopeful, Ghibli-esque.
Scenes: 3  Style: cinematic, warm, realistic  Duration/scene: 4s
LLM: qwen7b  Video: cogvideox  Backend: https://api.free.ai

⠼ Rendering scene 2/3…  ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╸━━━━━━━━━━ 4/5 0:01:14

──────────────────────────────── Done ────────────────────────────────────
Output: /tmp/freescene_abc123def456/abc123def456.mp4
Job ID: abc123def456  Elapsed: 167.4s

How it works

1. Script — an LLM acts as film director and writes N scene prompts from your one-line idea.
2. Render — each prompt is rendered as a short video clip via an OpenAI-compatible video API.
3. Concat — ffmpeg stitches the clips into one mp4. Stream-copy first; falls back to libx264 re-encode if codecs/containers don't match.

Same pipeline that powers free.ai/video/movie/, extracted into a standalone, self-installable CLI.

Install

pip install freeai-scene

You also need ffmpeg on PATH:

# macOS
brew install ffmpeg

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

# Windows
winget install Gyan.FFmpeg

Cost upfront — be honest

What you're running	Tokens	Anon (2,500/day)	Registered (30,000/day)	$5 pack (200K)
Single 2-second scene (cheapest)	5,100	🚫	✅ 5/day	~40 scenes
Default 3-scene 3-second movie	22,600	🚫	✅ 1 full movie/day	~9 movies
3-scene 4-second movie	30,100	🚫	🚫 (100 over)	~6 movies
5-scene 6-second movie	75,100	🚫	🚫	~2 movies

Per-scene cost is max(5,000, duration × 2,500). The CLI prints a cost estimate + affordability hint before each run; --dry-run shows it without spending.

Free tier sweet spot: a free.ai signup gets you 30,000 tokens/day — exactly enough for one default 3-scene 4-second movie every 24 hours, forever. For more, set FREE_API_KEY to your account credits, grab a $5 pack (200K tokens, ~6 movies), or run against your own GPU (see supported backends) for $0.

Quick start

No setup required — try a dry run first to see the cost:

freescene "Cyberpunk Tokyo at dawn, a lone hacker on a rooftop" --scenes 5 --style scifi --dry-run

Render it for real (needs an API key or your own backend — see above):

freescene "Cyberpunk Tokyo at dawn, a lone hacker on a rooftop" --scenes 5 --style scifi

For your full account quota:

export FREE_API_KEY=fk_live_...
freescene "Pixar squirrel learns to surf" -n 4 -s 3d -d 6

Bring your own backend (any OpenAI-compatible LLM + video API):

export FREE_API_URL=http://localhost:8080
export FREE_API_KEY=$YOUR_TOKEN
export LLM_MODEL=qwen3-30b
export VIDEO_MODEL=hunyuan-video
freescene "A drone flight over Mars colonies"

Mix and match — script-writing LLM on OpenAI, video render on a local vLLM:

export LLM_API_URL=https://api.openai.com
export LLM_MODEL=gpt-5
export VIDEO_API_URL=http://localhost:7860
export VIDEO_MODEL=cogvideox
freescene "Submarine exploring an alien reef"

CLI reference

freescene IDEA [OPTIONS]

  -n, --scenes INTEGER             Number of scene clips (1-12, default 3)
  -s, --style TEXT                 Style preset or free-form descriptor
                                   Presets: cinematic, anime, documentary,
                                   noir, 3d, vintage, scifi, fantasy
  -d, --duration INTEGER           Seconds per scene (2-12, default 4)
  -m, --video-model TEXT           Per-scene render model
      --llm-model TEXT             Script-writing model
      --api-url TEXT               OpenAI-compatible API root
      --api-key TEXT               Bearer token
  -o, --output FILE                Output .mp4 path
      --show-script                Print scene prompts before rendering
      --quiet                      Suppress progress UI (prints output path only)
      --version                    Show version
  -h, --help                       Show help

Python API

from freescene import make_movie, Config

cfg = Config(
    api_url="https://api.free.ai",
    api_key="fk_live_...",
    video_model="cogvideox",
)

result = make_movie(
    idea="A retired astronaut tends a rooftop garden in Tokyo...",
    num_scenes=3,
    style="ghibli-inspired, soft",
    duration_per_scene=4,
    config=cfg,
)

print(result.output_path)   # PosixPath('/tmp/.../abc123.mp4')
print(result.scenes)        # ['wide shot of ...', 'medium shot ...', 'close-up ...']
print(result.elapsed_s)     # 167.4

Async variant for when you're already inside an event loop:

from freescene.pipeline import make_movie_async

result = await make_movie_async(idea="...", num_scenes=3)

Environment variables

Var	Default	Purpose
FREE_API_URL	https://api.free.ai	OpenAI-compatible API root
FREE_API_KEY	(none)	Bearer token
LLM_API_URL	inherits FREE_API_URL	Override for /v1/chat/completions only
LLM_MODEL	qwen7b	Script-writing model id
VIDEO_API_URL	inherits FREE_API_URL	Override for /v1/video/generate/ only
VIDEO_MODEL	cogvideox	Per-scene render model

Supported backends

Anything that speaks OpenAI's chat-completions shape for scripts and a POST /v1/video/generate/ returning {video_url|output_url|url} for renders. Verified backends:

• Free.ai (default) — cogvideox, hunyuan-video, wan-i2v for video; qwen7b, qwen3-30b, GPT, Claude, Gemini etc. for the script.
• Your own vLLM + diffusers shim — set FREE_API_URL to your gateway.
• OpenAI for scripts — set LLM_API_URL=https://api.openai.com, LLM_MODEL=gpt-5, plus a separate VIDEO_API_URL for render.

If your video API returns a different JSON key, file an issue with a sample response — happy to widen the parser.

Development

git clone https://github.com/freeaigit/free-scene.git
cd free-scene
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest

Tests cover the LLM-output parser (mocked) and the ffmpeg-concat path (real ffmpeg, auto-skipped if not installed).

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Credits

Extracted from Free.ai's /video/movie/ pipeline. Use the hosted version at free.ai/video/movie/ if you don't want to manage your own GPU.