Huobao Drama Turns a One-Line Idea Into a Finished AI Video Episode
Huobao Drama is an open-source TypeScript platform that turns a single sentence into a fully produced short drama, automating every step from script to final video using a pipeline of five AI agents.
PRO- One-sentence to finished episode: Huobao Drama automates the full short-drama pipeline from script to composited video with zero manual steps.
- Five specialized AI agents: Script rewriting, character/scene extraction, storyboarding, voice assignment, and image prompt generation run in sequence via the Mastra framework.
- Multi-vendor video support: Integrates with MiniMax, ByteDance Seedance, Vidu, and Alibaba for video generation; OpenAI, Gemini, and others for images.
- Massive market context: The global micro-drama market hit $11B in 2025; China alone produced 470 AI-generated dramas per day in January 2026.
- Docker-first deployment: Ships as a single image with FFmpeg bundled; API keys configured through the web UI, not in code.
- CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license: Free for personal and research use; a commercial hosted version is also available.
Huobao Drama is a fully open-source, end-to-end AI production platform for short-form video dramas. You feed it a one-sentence premise. It hands you back a finished episode, complete with script, character visuals, storyboard shots, voice acting, and a composited video file. No director, no camera crew, no editor. The whole pipeline runs unattended.
The industry it was built for
This is not a solution looking for a problem. China's micro-drama market produces mobile-first shows designed for vertical viewing, with episodes often lasting just one to three minutes, built around fast pacing, emotional hooks, and constant cliffhangers. The scale is staggering: in January 2026 alone, an average of 470 AI-generated short dramas were released every single day in China.
The global micro-drama market reached an estimated $11 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit $14 billion in 2026. The economics are being rewritten in real time. ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 and Kuaishou's Kling 3.0 have moved AI video from experimental tool to industrial backbone, compressing what once took three to four months of production into less than a month, cutting series costs from roughly $200,000 to between $7,000 and $14,000. Huobao Drama is the open-source version of that industrial pipeline, available to anyone with a laptop and API keys.
Five agents, one pipeline
The architecture is built around Mastra, an open-source TypeScript framework for building AI-powered applications and agents that provides agents, workflows, memory, workspaces and observability. Huobao Drama defines five specialized agents that hand off work to each other in sequence:
- script_rewriter , takes raw novel text or a premise and rewrites it into a structured drama script
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