When your agent needs an MFA in screenwriting

What it does

This repo packages 24 agent skills—standardized SKILL.md files for Claude Code and OpenAI Codex—that inject professional screenwriting, television, and stagecraft knowledge directly into your agent. The skills cover everything from feature-film structure and sitcom mechanics to Chinese opera dramaturgy and writers’-room protocol, all distilled from 45 craft books and 23 published script volumes across five languages.

The interesting bit

The entire instruction tree is written in Chinese, not because it is a Chinese-only tool, but as a deliberate maintenance strategy: one source tree, runtime translation. The authors previously maintained a parallel English edition, then killed it after realizing that five translated forks would mean 230 files drifting out of sync. Instead, a shared terms.md anchors concepts to their original English vocabulary—logline, act out, beat sheet—and lets the agent render responses in whatever language you ask.

Key highlights

• Dual-agent compatibility: the same SKILL.md files load into both Claude Code and OpenAI Codex without rewriting.
• Four-layer taxonomy: general dramaturgy, medium-specific mechanics (series, stage, sitcom), regional traditions (American, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, French), and master corpora (Chekhov, Ozu, Succession).
• Granular craft coverage: includes niche skills like sw-chinese-opera-banqiang (banqiang-system method for Peking opera and variants) and sw-writers-room (showrunner duties, breaking story with Chase’s 35 beats, staff-ladder step deals).
• Runtime multilingualism: ask in French, get French; ask in Japanese, get Japanese. The source stays Chinese, the output follows your prompt.
• A sw-workflow meta-skill that maps project stages (feature or series) and maintains a story-bible.md convention to keep state across sessions.

Caveats

• You cannot audit the raw SKILL.md instructions unless you read Chinese; the deleted English edition was removed to avoid a five-way maintenance burden.
• The sw-writers-room skill explicitly flags some sources—notably Blum—as dated.

Verdict

Grab this if you want your agent to stop improvising three-act structure and start citing McKee, Calvisi, or Lu Jun. Skip it if you are looking for a standalone screenwriting app; this is pure agent infrastructure, not a word processor.