n8n Workflow: Claude Opus + Shotstack AI Story Shorts Maker

Turn your stories into ready-to-post 60-second AI Shorts—fully automated in n8n

Paste a story, and this n8n workflow automatically generates a vertical story Short: a post-style title card, six AI images in story order, an ElevenLabs narration, word-by-word captions, and a music track from Shotstack—saved to your n8n “stories” folder. Built for TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts, and designed for self-hosted n8n only.

What this workflow does

• Initial setup & one-time prep: It installs the Shotstack community node and downloads Shotstack’s guide for AI agents once.
• Claude Opus story-to-edit: Claude Opus 5.5 trims each story to ~1 minute and writes the complete Shotstack edit: title card, six “Nano Banana 2” pictures in story order, ElevenLabs narration, word-by-word captions, and a music selection from Shotstack’s music library.
• Cost-protecting validation: A Code step checks the Shotstack edit before anything costly happens. It fixes small issues itself and sends anything else back to Claude.
• Render & retry logic: Shotstack generates the images, narration, and final Short. If Shotstack rejects the edit or the render fails, Claude fixes it—up to twice.

Use cases

• For story channels: quickly batch-produce vertical Shorts from your existing writing.
• SaaS operators: create a repeatable pipeline for social content generation without manual editing.
• Automation engineers: study a practical n8n pattern—LLM edit generation, preflight checks, and render retries.

Technical details

• n8n nodes: if, set, code, no op, wait, sticky note.
• Integrations: Anthropic (Claude Opus 5.5) and Shotstack (community node) for video rendering + validation.
• AI voice & captions: ElevenLabs narration and word-by-word captions generated as part of the Shotstack edit.

Setup is straightforward: install the Shotstack community node, add your Anthropic API key (Claude) and Shotstack API key (Make the video + Check the render), then paste stories with a title on the first line and --- between each story.