> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.genesiscomputing.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Explainer Videos > Ask an agent for a short narrated explainer video about any topic: a whiteboard animation or a social short, rendered as 16:9 and vertical 9:16 MP4s with voice-over and music. ## Overview An agent can make a short animated explainer video for you about almost any topic: how something works, how it came to be, a process, a place, an idea, your own product, or "how our lineage works". It writes the story, designs a drawing for every line, draws it in one of two styles, records an AI voice-over, adds a music bed and renders MP4 files you can download. You approve the story, the script and the key frames before anything is rendered, and you get a quality report with the files. The agent never publishes a video. It hands you the files and a draft caption; posting is your decision. ## Ask for a video Ask in chat, in your own words. For example: > Make me a whiteboard video about how a sailboat sails upwind. > Make an explainer about how the Channel Tunnel was conceived, built and operates. > Make a 30-second social short, in the orange orb style, about catching bad data before > it reaches a dashboard. The agent uses its `explainer-video` skill and works through four steps, stopping at each one for your approval: 1. **The message.** One sentence that is the point of the film, and 3 to 5 beats that carry it. Agreeing this first keeps the story from drifting. 2. **The script, the drawings and the stills.** One narration line per beat (60 seconds or less unless you ask otherwise), and for each line a plan of what the viewer sees. Facts come from your own material and reliable sources the agent can reach (a web search, when one is set up), kept modest, with no invented numbers or dates. In a film about Genesis, every product claim is checked against the Genesis documentation; in a film about your data, every number comes from a real query or is marked as illustrative. The agent records the voice-over and shows you a still of every beat. The film also plays in its app: open the app to play it, scrub through it and switch between 16:9 and 9:16. 3. **The render.** The agent renders the films in the background and checks them automatically (see [What the quality check covers](#what-the-quality-check-covers)). 4. **Delivery.** You get the MP4 files, a draft caption that says the voice is AI-generated, and the quality report, including what it could not check. Ask for changes at any step: a different line, a different scene, a shorter film, the other style. The agent edits the storyboard and redoes only the steps the change touches. ## What you get | File | Use | | - | - | | `-16x9.mp4` | 1920x1080 master, H.264 video with Opus audio | | `-16x9-720p.mp4` | 1280x720 share copy, smaller to upload or send | | `-9x16.mp4` | Vertical 1080x1920 film laid out for phones (a real vertical layout, not a crop) | Every film has the voice-over, burned-in captions (most social video plays muted), and a generated music bed under the voice, ducked while the voice speaks and mixed to about -14 LUFS. The music has no percussion. In a film about Genesis no third-party logos appear on screen; in a film about your own organization the agent follows the brand you give it. ## Styles | Style | Looks like | Good for | | - | - | - | | **Whiteboard** | Marker strokes on white paper drawn on by a hand, one big board the camera pans across, stick figures and little agents, ending on a numbered "how it all works" diagram | How something works, a process, an architecture, training and internal explainers | | **Orb** | A dark warm stage with a glowing orange orb character, cards, pills, stamps, tile grids and cartoon people, ending on a call-to-action card | Punchy social shorts, a product moment, a problem and its fix | Say which you want ("whiteboard", "the orb style", "with little stick figures"), or let the agent suggest one: whiteboard for teaching and step-by-step explanations, orb for a punchy social short. The style decides how things are drawn and the storyboard what is drawn, so the same film can be switched to the other style. ## How the drawings are made For every beat the agent decides what you need to see to understand the line, then draws it the simplest way that works: * **A preset scene** of the style (a row of boxes, a list of steps, a checklist, a closing card), filled with the film's own words. * **A composed drawing** built from general elements, all drawn by the style's own pen: | Element | Good for | | - | - | | Text, shapes, paths | Titles and labels; boxes and circles; any outline, such as a hull, an organ or a machine part | | Arrows | Cause and effect, movement, forces; flowing arrows for wind, water, heat or money | | Callouts | A label with a line to a part, as in a labelled diagram | | Timeline | Dates and events in order | | Chart, counter | A small bar or line chart; one number counting up | | Bands | Layers of a cross-section: sea and sky, rock strata, the layers of a wall | | Figures, icons | People pointing or thinking; over 250 bundled line icons | | Images | Pictures: AI-generated or your own | | Groups and motion | Parts that move, turn or loop together, such as a machine moving along a path | The template ships two films made this way as examples: "how a sailboat sails upwind" and "how the Channel Tunnel was conceived, built and operates", each in both styles. ### Pictures and transparency When the pen cannot draw something convincingly (an animal, a particular machine, a building), the agent can make a picture with AI image generation. It describes only the subject; the style's look is added automatically, and pictures never contain words. The picture comes back with a transparent background, so it sits on the board like a drawn object and can fly in, move along a path or be sketched in by the hand: * on **GPT-Image 1** models the background is transparent as drawn; * on other image models the picture is drawn on a plain background, which is then removed from the edges inwards. Background enclosed by the subject (the hole in a ring) can stay, so solid subjects work best. The agent looks at every picture in the stills and redraws or replaces one that came out wrong. Each picture is a paid image request, so a film usually has none to four. You can also give the agent your own images (a logo, a product photo) to use in the film. ### Longer films Films are 60 seconds or less by default. Ask for a longer one, up to five minutes, and the agent splits it into chapters, each opened by a title card. ## Prerequisites The agent checks these itself before it starts and tells you plainly what is missing. | Needed for | What | Notes | | - | - | - | | Stills and rendering | Chromium (through Playwright) with H.264 and Opus encoding | Included in Genesis server images. Genesis Desktop downloads it the first time a video is rendered. | | Voice-over | A speech engine | The speech provider Genesis is configured with (`text_to_speech.provider`), or the built-in offline voice (Kokoro), which Genesis falls back to when no cloud provider can speak. See [GenesisApps Tools](https://docs.genesiscomputing.com/docs/Genbot-Toolkit/GenesisApps-Tools#text_to_speech). | | AI pictures (optional) | An image-generation provider | The one `image_generation` uses (see [Image Tools](https://docs.genesiscomputing.com/docs/Genbot-Toolkit/Image-Tools.md)). Without it, films are drawn from shapes, paths, icons and your own images. | | Facts for general topics (optional) | Web search | Lets the agent check facts on the web. Without it, the agent uses your material and what it is sure of, and tells you which facts to check. | | Checking on-screen text (optional) | Tesseract OCR on the server | Without it the quality check lists on-screen text as not checked; everything else still runs. | Without Chromium a video cannot be rendered; the agent can still write the script and storyboard, which you can watch in the app's preview. ### Air-gapped servers Making a video needs no internet access when: * the voice is the offline Kokoro voice, with its voice bundle (about 350 MB) copied onto the server ahead of time and `text_to_speech.local_allow_download` turned off. The steps are in [GenesisApps Tools](https://docs.genesiscomputing.com/docs/Genbot-Toolkit/GenesisApps-Tools#text_to_speech); * Chromium is part of the server image. Genesis Desktop downloads its browser on first use, so install it in **Settings → Advanced → Browser tools** while a connection is available. The fonts, scenes, icons and music are part of the app template, so nothing else is fetched while a video is drawn or rendered. AI pictures need the image provider; on an air-gapped server without one, the agent draws with shapes, paths and icons. ## What the quality check covers After rendering, the agent runs an automatic check of the files and gives you its report. | Checked automatically | Not checked: a person must watch and listen | | - | - | | Duration against the storyboard's timeline | Motion and animation quality | | Video and audio codecs and frame size | How the voice sounds (pronunciation, pacing) | | Loudness and peak level | The music and how it sits under the voice | | Blank frames, decoded from the files themselves | Whether the story lands | | Each beat's on-screen text, read back with OCR | | | Text running past the edge of the frame | | A person must watch and listen to every final cut before it is shared. The voice is AI-generated: say so when you post it (the draft caption already does). ## For developers The workflow is the `explainer-video` agent skill. A video is a GenesisApp scaffolded from the `explainer_video` template: its `storyboard.json` lists beats, each a preset scene of a style pack or a `compose` beat of generic elements, with its narration line, described in the app's `STORYBOARD_SCHEMA.md`. The template ships ready-to-render sample storyboards in `samples/`: `sailboat.json` and `channel-tunnel.json` (compose beats only, with `-orb` copies in the other style), and `whiteboard.json`, `lineage.json` and `orb.json` (presets). The `explainer_video_action` tool narrates, makes and imports pictures, searches the icon set, takes stills, renders and checks the films; see [GenesisApps Tools](https://docs.genesiscomputing.com/docs/Genbot-Toolkit/GenesisApps-Tools#explainer_video_action).