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Show HN: OpenMontage Drama Studio – self-hosted AI studio for short dramas

A developer released OpenMontage Drama Studio, a self-hostable web studio that turns a one-line idea into a finished short drama, viral short or product clip through a seven-stage pipeline: script, characters, scenes, props, storyboard and shots, voice, and edit. The studio lets users bring their own API keys for text, image and video models configured per account, with character, scene and prop reference images feeding the video shots so a single character or shot can be redone without restarting, and it offers an agent that can run the whole pipeline in the background. A hosted instance is available at openmontage.dtok.io, and the inspiration wall, skills and asset pages can be browsed without signing in, while model calls and saving projects require an account.

read6 min views1 publishedOct 28, 2026
Show HN: OpenMontage Drama Studio – self-hosted AI studio for short dramas
Image: Michielbdejong (auto-discovered)

From a one-line idea to a finished short drama, viral short or product clip.

Script → characters → scenes → props → storyboard & shots → voice → edit, in one self-hostable web studio.

⭐ If this is useful, a star helps others find it.

English · 简体中文

OpenMontage Drama Studio is a web studio for making short-form video with AI. You describe an idea in one sentence (for example "10-episode revenge drama, 9:16, hook in the first 3 seconds"), the studio drafts the script, and you move it through a production line where every stage is editable. Characters, scenes and props become reference images that feed the video shots, so you can redo a single character or shot without starting over.

  • Bring your own keys. Text models, image models and video models are configured per account inModel settings .
  • Browse first. The inspiration wall, skills and asset pages can be browsed without signing in; signing in is required for model calls and saving projects.
  • Step by step or one click. Run each stage yourself, or let the agent run the whole pipeline in the background and then re-run any stage or swap a version.

Try the hosted instance: openmontage.dtok.io

# Stage What happens
1 Script (剧本) Genre, aspect ratio, visual style, synopsis or source material; generate, continue, rewrite, lock the episode
2 Characters (角色) Character art (Seedream, or ComfyUI on your own GPU), version history, turnarounds, reference re-draws, local upload
3 Scenes (场景) Space and lighting setup, scene concept art
4 Props (道具) Key props and material detail
5 Storyboard & shots (分镜) LLM shot breakdown; Seedance generates each shot using the character / scene / prop references
6 Voice (配音) Narration and dialogue TTS (edge-tts by default, OpenAI-compatible speech as fallback), mixed in on export
7 Edit (剪辑) Order the segments on a timeline and export the episode

In the current UI, stages 1–4 have their own tabs and stages 5–7 happen together per segment in the Workspace (工作台) tab. The infinite canvas shows the same seven stages as a node graph, coloured by progress.

  • Short dramas. Project templates for 爽剧 (hype drama), 短剧 (short drama) and 正剧 (straight drama), or upload your own script.
  • Viral short videos. TheViral gallery (爆款内容广场) has beat-by-beat playbooks for Douyin, TikTok, Xiaohongshu, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Bilibili (hooks, pacing, CTA) that you can send straight into a project. These are structural templates based on common feed patterns, not scraped trending charts.
  • Ad and product videos. A built-in e-commerce conversion template (pain point → product demo close-ups → benefit captions → CTA), a soft product-placement Reels playbook, and marketing / e-commerce skills in the skill market. They run through the same workshop; there is no separate ad editor.
Module What it does
Viral gallery (爆款内容广场) Platform playbooks, copyable prompts, a visual reference wall
Creation hub (创作中心) Text / visual / audio / video / workshop / canvas entry points
Creation agent (创作 Agent) One-line project setup: genre, episode count, aspect ratio, hook; generates the first scripts and checks which models are configured
Workshop (影视工坊) Project library and the 7-stage production line
Assets (个人资产) Media and prompt library, filtered by character / scene / prop / storyboard / final cut
Skill market (Skill 专家) Official and community skills (episode scripts, shot prompts, character looks, director workflows) you can install into the agent
Infinite canvas (无限画布) The project pipeline as a draggable node graph
Model settings (模型配置) Text and media providers, connection test, hot reload without restart
Also Works channel, challenges, resources, usage stats, task queue, help center, credits, referral program

Screenshots #

  React UI (studio/src)
       │
       ▼
  FastAPI (studio/server) ──▶ PostgreSQL  (projects · studio_kv · meta)
       │            └──────▶ Redis       (media job queue)
       └──▶ MinIO / S3     (inspire · media blobs)
Path Contents
studio/ Drama Studio front end and API
studio/config/platform.yaml Navigation, workshop stages, tools, copy (single source of truth)
pipeline_defs/ ·skills/ Agent pipelines and director skills
lib/ ·tools/ Tool registry
docs/screenshots/ Screenshots used in this README
Included in docker-compose.studio.yml ?
Studio app (UI + API) and media worker ✅ built from this repo
PostgreSQL 16 ✅ bundled
Redis 7 (media job queue) ✅ bundled
S3-compatible object storage (MinIO / S3) ❌ you provide an endpoint, access key, secret and bucket (OSS_* /MINIO_* /S3_* )
Text LLM key ❌ you provide : DeepSeek, OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Qwen (通义), Doubao (豆包), Kimi, GLM, MiniMax, OpenRouter or another OpenAI-compatible endpoint
Image + video generation ❌ you provide : a Volcengine Ark key forSeedream (images) andSeedance (video). These arepaid third-party APIs . Images can instead go to your own ComfyUI server.
TTS edge-tts by default (no key); optional OpenAI-compatible speech endpoint

Other things to know:

  • studio/.env.example ships with defaults for the hosted instance (openmontage.dtok.io , its MinIO host and the DTok account API inAPI_BASE_URL ). Replace them with your own values. By default sign-in is proxied to the account API inAPI_BASE_URL ; seeSTUDIO_AUTH_REQUIRED and the demo-user settings in the same file.
  • The hosted instance has a credits / top-up page. Self-hosted, you pay your model providers directly.

Docker (Compose reads .env from the repo root):

cp studio/.env.example .env
docker compose -f docker-compose.studio.yml up --build

Local development:

cp studio/.env.example studio/.env

cd studio/server && pip install -r requirements.txt
uvicorn app:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8787

cd studio && npm install && npm run dev   # http://127.0.0.1:5173, /api is proxied to 8787

Agent / CLI pipeline notes: AGENT_GUIDE.md.

Python · FastAPI · React · PostgreSQL · Redis · MinIO / S3 · Seedream · Seedance · edge-tts · FFmpeg · Docker / Coolify

OpenMontage Drama Studio is an independent product by @charliewwdev. It started from the AGPL-3.0 calesthio/OpenMontage codebase and has since been rebuilt into a separate short-drama studio. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the upstream project. The repository keeps the upstream git history, so upstream authors appear in the contributor list.

Licensed under the GNU AGPL-3.0; see LICENSE.

This is a modified version of calesthio/OpenMontage. Original code is copyright its respective authors; modifications are by @charliewwdev (see the git history for what changed and when). If you run a modified version as a network service, AGPL-3.0 §13 requires you to offer its source to your users.

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