How to Make AI Animations for $0 Without Paying for Claude

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You can make the stick-figure What If cartoons that are all over YouTube for $0, with no Claude subscription. You need three things: a free AI agent, a free model, and a skill that holds all the know-how.

OpenCode is a free, open-source app that does the same job as Claude Code. Inside it, GLM-5.3-Flash Free costs nothing for now, with no account and no API key. The free What If skill tells the model exactly how to write, voice, storyboard and animate an episode, so the model doesn't need to be a genius. It just follows the recipe.

This page has every link from the video, the setup commands for Windows and Mac, and the tips that save you time.

What do you need to make AI animations for free?

OpenCode: the app the AI works in

OpenCode is a free, open-source coding agent. Like Claude Code, it reads your files, runs commands and writes code on your computer. It comes with a set of free models you can use without creating an account.

GLM-5.3-Flash Free: the model that does the thinking

GLM-5.3-Flash Free is free inside OpenCode for a limited time, so use it while it lasts. Every run in the video used it on the high reasoning level.

The What If skill: the know-how

A skill is a folder of instructions, scripts and animation code written for the AI. This one holds the story formula, the pace, how the light works and the checks the model runs on its own storyboard. It's free and MIT licensed, and it comes with a /what-if command for OpenCode.

Remotion: turns the code into a video

The model writes every scene as code, and Remotion renders it. It's free for individuals and for companies of up to three people. Bigger companies need a Remotion company licence.

ElevenLabs: the voice and the sound effects

ElevenLabs' free plan gives you 10,000 credits a month. The two episodes in the video used 187 and 242 credits, so that's roughly 40 to 50 episodes a month. The free plan is for personal use and asks you to credit ElevenLabs, so check its terms before you monetise a channel.

Node.js, Python and FFmpeg: the tools underneath

Node.js is what Remotion runs on, so it's the engine that renders your video. Python runs the skill's helper scripts, which fetch the voice, line the shots up with the words and lay out the storyboard. FFmpeg handles the audio and video files, and sets the finished episode to the right loudness. All three are free.

How do you set up OpenCode and the free model?

Install the three tools first. On Windows, open a terminal and run one line for each:

winget install OpenJS.NodeJS.LTS
winget install Python.Python.3.12
winget install Gyan.FFmpeg

Then open a new terminal and install the two Python packages the skill uses:

pip install numpy pillow

On a Mac, install the three tools with Homebrew instead: brew install node python ffmpeg.

Then install OpenCode itself, with one command:

npm install -g opencode-ai

Make a folder for your cartoons, and always start OpenCode from inside it. OpenCode only sees the skills in the folder you open it in, so if you start it anywhere else, your skill won't be there. Either cd into the folder, or on Windows, right-click the folder, choose Open in Terminal and type opencode.

Once it's open, type /models, pick GLM-5.3-Flash Free, and press Ctrl+T until the reasoning level reads high.

How do you install the What If skill in OpenCode?

The skill goes in your cartoon folder under .claude/skills/, and its /what-if command goes in .opencode/commands/. OpenCode doesn't list skills when you type a slash, so the command loads the skill for you.

The video downloads the ZIP. On the skill's GitHub page, click Code, then Download ZIP, and unzip it into .claude/skills/ in your cartoon folder. Then copy opencode/commands/what-if.md from it into .opencode/commands/.

If you have git, these commands from the skill's README do the same thing. On Windows, in PowerShell:

mkdir what-if; cd what-if
git clone https://github.com/kelano86/what-if-animation .claude/skills/what-if-animation
mkdir .opencode/commands
copy .claude/skills/what-if-animation/opencode/commands/what-if.md .opencode/commands/

On a Mac or Linux:

mkdir what-if && cd what-if
git clone https://github.com/kelano86/what-if-animation .claude/skills/what-if-animation
mkdir -p .opencode/commands && cp .claude/skills/what-if-animation/opencode/commands/what-if.md .opencode/commands/

The skill needs one key, for the ElevenLabs voice. Make a free ElevenLabs account, create an API key, and save it in a file called .env in the same folder, on one line:

ELEVENLABS_API_KEY=your-key

How do you make your first cartoon?

Start OpenCode in your folder, type /what-if and your idea as a What If question, then press Enter and leave it running:

/what-if What if you could see one minute ahead?

It follows the skill from top to bottom. It writes the script, voices it, draws a storyboard and fixes it, animates every shot in code and adds the sound. The finished episode lands in the studio's out folder, under the episode's name.

Four tips from the video save you time:

• Start a fresh session for every cartoon. One episode used about 70% of the free model's memory.
• Search YouTube for your idea yourself. In the video's test, the free model's search missed episodes that already existed. If a channel has already made yours, give it a twist.
• Check the fact. Every episode has one real fact in it, and the skill makes the model write down where it came from. Open that source before you post.
• Give notes in plain words. Say something like "the ball in shot three is covering his face", and it fixes that shot and renders it again.

The characters work the same way. They aren't generated images: the same bit of code draws all of them, with a different costume on top, so making your own hero just means describing it. This is the line from the video:

Add a new hero to the cast: a girl with a high ponytail, a yellow raincoat and red boots.

It drew a cast sheet with her standing next to everyone else, so you can check she fits in. Then it swapped her into the episode and rendered it again with the same voice and sound, so the swap cost no ElevenLabs credits. Because she's code, she looks the same in every shot.

Is the free model as good as Claude Opus?

It's close enough that it's hard to tell them apart. The video gave the free model and Claude Opus the same skill, the same computer and the same one-line idea, then let each one run to the end without a single note. Both wrote, voiced, storyboarded, checked, animated and mixed a finished episode on their first and only render.

The storyboard check is what makes a free model good enough. It looked at its own stills, decided 7 of its 15 shots didn't read, like a ball sitting in front of a character's face, and fixed every one before it animated anything.

There were two real differences. Opus found five What If channels that had already done "see one minute ahead" and changed its idea, while the free model's search didn't find them. And the free model took several tries to get the sound mix right, though both episodes came out at the same loudness. Opus ran on a paid Claude plan, and the free model cost nothing.

Can a free model build the skill too?

Not yet, and that's the one job still worth paying Claude for. Given frames from a viral What If episode, the free model wrote 22 style rules and got most of the look right: the sunset colours, the light from windows and lamps, the glow along the characters' edges. But it counted about 16 cuts a minute where the opening really has 27, so a skill built on its notes would cut at about half the pace.

So use the free model to run skills, and Claude to build them. You're not limited to this one skill, either: the skills that edit Baptiste's Instagram reels are free on GitHub too. To see how this skill was built with Claude, from measuring the style to designing the characters, read how to make What If cartoons with Claude Code.

Animation is one job a free model can now take on. To find the ones costing your business the most time, take the free AI bottleneck test, or read our insights on AI implementation.