kanban-video-orchestrator
Plan, set up, and monitor a multi-agent video production pipeline backed by Hermes Kanban. Use when the user wants to make ANY video — narrative film, product/marketing, music video, explainer, ASCII/
Plan, set up, and monitor a multi-agent video production pipeline backed by Hermes Kanban. Use when the user wants to make ANY video — narrative film, product/marketing, music video, explainer, ASCII/
Real data. Real impact.
Emerging
Developers
Per week
Excellent
Skills give you superpowers. Install in 30 seconds.
Wrap any video request — from a 15-second product teaser to a 5-minute narrative short to a music video to an ASCII loop — in a Hermes Kanban pipeline that decomposes the work to specialized agent profiles.
This skill does not render anything itself. It is a meta-pipeline that:
The actual rendering happens inside the kanban once it's running, via whichever existing skills + tools fit the scenes —
ascii-video, manim-video, p5js,
comfyui, touchdesigner-mcp, blender-mcp, songwriting-and-ai-music,
heartmula, external APIs, or plain Python with PIL + ffmpeg.
ascii-art, gifs, meme-generation, songwriting-and-ai-music).ascii-video).DISCOVER → BRIEF → TEAM DESIGN → SETUP → EXECUTE → MONITOR
The discovery process is adaptive: ask only what is actually needed. Always start with three questions to identify the broad shape:
From the answer, classify the style category. The style determines which follow-up questions to ask. Do not ask all questions at once. Ask 2-4 at a time, listen, then proceed. Make reasonable assumptions whenever the user implies an answer.
For complete intake patterns and per-style question banks, see references/intake.md.
Once enough is known, produce a structured
brief.md using the template in
assets/brief.md.tmpl. Stages:
Show the brief to the user for confirmation before designing the team. The brief is the contract — every downstream task references it.
Pick role archetypes from the library that fit this video. Compose, don't clone. Most videos need 4-7 profiles. The director is always present; the rest are picked by what the brief actually requires.
For the role library and per-style team compositions, see references/role-archetypes.md.
For mapping role → which Hermes skills + toolsets it loads, see references/tool-matrix.md.
Generate a setup script (
setup.sh) and run it. The script:
~/projects/video-pipeline/<slug>/)taste/, audio/, assets/hermes profile create --cloneSOUL.md (personality + role definition)brief.md, TEAM.md, and taste/ contenthermes kanban create task assigned to the directorUse
scripts/bootstrap_pipeline.py to generate setup.sh from a brief +
team-design JSON. See references/kanban-setup.md
for the setup script structure, profile config patterns, and the critical
"shared workspace" rule.
Run
setup.sh. Then provide the user with monitoring commands:
hermes kanban watch --tenant <project-tenant> # live events hermes kanban list --tenant <project-tenant> # board snapshot hermes dashboard # visual board UI
The director profile takes over from here, decomposing the work and routing tasks to specialist profiles via the kanban toolset.
Stay engaged — the kanban runs autonomously but a stuck task or bad output needs human (or AI) judgment.
Monitoring patterns: poll
kanban list periodically, inspect any RUNNING task
that exceeds its expected duration with kanban show <id>, and check
heartbeats. When a worker's output fails review, the standard interventions are:
kanban_comment)For diagnostic patterns, intervention recipes, and the "task is stuck" playbook, see references/monitoring.md.
Six concrete pipelines covering very different video styles — narrative film, product/marketing, music video, math/algorithm explainer, ASCII video, real-time installation — showing how the same workflow yields very different teams and task graphs. See references/examples.md.
Discovery before action. Never start generating a brief or team without asking at least the three baseline questions. A bad brief cascades through the entire pipeline.
Match the team to the video. Don't reuse the same 4-profile setup for every job. A music video that doesn't have a beat-analysis profile will misfire. A narrative film that doesn't have a writer profile will produce incoherent scenes. See
references/role-archetypes.md.
One workspace per project. All profiles for a given video share the same
dir: workspace. Tasks pass artifacts via shared filesystem and structured
handoffs. Every kanban_create call passes
workspace_kind="dir" + workspace_path="<absolute project path>".
Tenant every project. Use a project-specific tenant (
--tenant <project-slug>). Keeps the dashboard scoped and prevents
cross-pollination with other ongoing kanbans.
Respect existing skills. When a scene fits an existing skill, the relevant renderer should load that skill via
--skill <name> on its task
or always_load in its profile. Do not re-derive what a skill already
provides.
The director never executes. Even with the full
kanban + terminal + file toolset, the director's SOUL.md rules forbid it from executing
work itself. It decomposes and routes only — every concrete task becomes
a hermes kanban create call to a specialist profile. The
kanban-orchestrator skill spells this out further.
Don't over-decompose. A 30-second product video does NOT need 20 tasks. Aim for the smallest task graph that still parallelizes well and exposes the right human-review gates.
Verify API keys BEFORE firing. External APIs (TTS, image-gen, image-to-video) need keys in
~/.hermes/.env or the user's secret store.
A worker that hits a missing-key error wastes a task slot. The setup
script's check_key helper aborts cleanly if a required key is missing.
SKILL.md ← this file (workflow + rules) references/ intake.md ← discovery question banks per style role-archetypes.md ← role library (writer, designer, animator, …) tool-matrix.md ← skill + toolset mapping per role kanban-setup.md ← setup script structure & profile config monitoring.md ← watch + intervene patterns examples.md ← six worked pipelines assets/ brief.md.tmpl ← brief skeleton setup.sh.tmpl ← setup script skeleton soul.md.tmpl ← profile personality skeleton scripts/ bootstrap_pipeline.py ← generate setup.sh from brief + team JSON monitor.py ← polling + intervention helpers
MIT
mkdir -p ~/.hermes/skills/creative/kanban-video-orchestrator && curl -o ~/.hermes/skills/creative/kanban-video-orchestrator/SKILL.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/optional-skills/creative/kanban-video-orchestrator/SKILL.md1,500+ AI skills, agents & workflows. Install in 30 seconds. Part of the Torly.ai family.
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