Tencent's WorkRally CLI Turns a Single Photo Into a Dubbed Short Drama for 30 Yuan

Today, let's talk about Tencent's comic platform WorkRally and how to use AI to handle everything in one stop.

There will be a hands-on section at the end of the article, so please be patient and read on.

Hello everyone, I'm Xiao Hu.

The Lobster Knowledge Base Training Camp has ended.

15 days. To be honest, I didn't even think I could make it through myself. Busy with business during the day, answering questions at night, sometimes still replying to messages in the group in the early morning. But it was worth it.

Because in this cohort, one student really moved me.

Lao Yang, born in the 60s, over sixty years old. He clocked in earlier than anyone every day, took more detailed notes than anyone, and was still discussing in the group until eleven o'clock at night.

On the last day of the camp, he sent a message saying that at his age, he never thought he could still keep up with the pace of AI.

I froze in front of the screen for several seconds.

Frankly, I'm from the 70s myself. Lao Yang is more than a full zodiac cycle older than me, and he still managed to complete the whole program.

This incident made me rethink a question.

When it comes to a one-person company, who is actually best suited for it?

The older you are, the greater the leverage

Many people think a one-person company is a young person's game. Post-95s, post-00s, full of energy, quick learners, able to grind it out alone.

But the truth is, a one-person company has never been about physical strength.

It's about leverage.

You've been working hard in this industry for twenty or thirty years, accumulating industry knowledge, client resources, and a network of contacts. How can young people compete with that?

An old salesperson who has been in the medical device industry for thirty years has an understanding of the industry that a fresh graduate intern can't catch up with just by reading a few books.

The shortcoming of middle-aged and elderly people running a one-person company has always been obvious. Physical strength and energy can't keep up, and one person can't handle everything.

Writing copy, creating graphics, shooting videos, running ad campaigns—you have to do everything yourself, and you simply can't manage it all.

But now, AI has filled in this shortcoming.

AI writes the copy, AI creates the graphics, AI shoots the videos, AI assists with ad campaigns.

You only need to make decisions, make judgments, and inject the industry knowledge you've accumulated over thirty years. AI handles the execution for you.

Frankly, the era of the middle-aged and elderly one-person company is not the future; it's the present.

Experience is your moat, and AI is your leverage. With these two things combined, young people can't catch up.

Why short videos?

Actually, there are many ways for a one-person company to acquire customers, but I've always felt that short videos are the most cost-effective path right now.

The reason is simple.

It's 2026. Douyin, WeChat Channels, Xiaohongshu—which platform isn't pushing short videos aggressively? The algorithm favors video content; this is an open secret.

For the same piece of content, the reach of a text-and-image post is about one-tenth that of a video.

For text-and-image posts, you need to output continuously and at high frequency, and they're easy to copy. For live streaming, you need to show your face and have the ability to improvise on the spot; the barrier to entry isn't low.

But short videos are different. One person can do it, and one viral hit can bring in traffic for several weeks.

For middle-aged and elderly one-person companies, short videos have two particularly big advantages.

First, you don't need to be young and beautiful. Short videos aren't about looks; they're about the value of the content.

An old engineer with twenty years of experience sharing industry knowledge is far more useful than a pretty young girl acting cute in front of the camera.

Second, your industry experience is the content itself.

Topics that others would take three months to brainstorm, you can just pull out a case study and it's valuable content. This is the leverage of experience.

But here comes the problem.

Making videos has stopped too many people in their tracks

Many people want to make short videos, and they all get stuck at the same place.

The video production itself.

Writing the script is easy, publishing is easy, but video production is a huge pitfall.

Do the math yourself. To shoot a five-minute talking-head video, it takes two hours to write the script, one hour to record, and three hours to edit. You can produce at most one per day.

If you want to do narrative or scene-based content, it's even more laborious.

Hire someone to shoot? A photographer costs three thousand a day, an editor costs five hundred per video. Daily updates? The cost is simply unsustainable.

Using AI-generated images for storyboarding is even worse. The face changes with every shot, the clothes change, the expressions don't match—you can tell at a glance it's AI-generated.

The problem of character consistency is something most tools on the market currently can't solve.

To be honest, most people are discouraged from making short videos by the video production process itself before they even start.

WorkRally, a path provided by Tencent

Last month, Tencent launched a product called WorkRally.

Honestly, I didn't pay much attention to it at first, thinking it was just another AI video generator.

But after using it, I found it's really different from the tools on the market.

WorkRally is an AI comic and video creation platform built by Tencent's Hunyuan team.

It doesn't pursue the route of 'generating a cool video with one sentence.' Instead, it's specifically for creating coherent content like short dramas, short series, and vertical-scroll comics that require characters and storyboards.

Three things impressed me the most.

Character consistency.

Upload a photo, and it generates a multi-view character design sheet—front, side, and back views all at once.

Then the character's appearance is locked in. No matter how many images or video clips you generate afterward, the face, clothes, and expressions all belong to the same person.

This solves the biggest pain point of AI video.

Zero-cost experience.

New users have no credits after registration, but you can ask customer service for new user trial credits.

I contacted customer service, exchanged a few words, and within ten minutes, 300 credits were in my account.

Generating one image costs about 15 credits, and making a 5-second video costs about 50 credits. 300 credits are enough to make a four-scene short drama.

It has a CLI.

This is what really got me excited. WorkRally provides a command-line interface with 33 API commands.

This means it can be used in conjunction with an AI programming assistant to achieve full automation.

Let's expand on this third point.

WorkBuddy plus WorkRally, the entire process from photo to finished film

Most AI products are web interfaces where you click buttons and wait for results. But WorkRally has a CLI, which changes everything.

I organized WorkRally's official documentation into a skill and imported it into WorkBuddy.

Simply put, my AI assistant learned how to call all of WorkRally's commands.

Then, I just needed to say one sentence to WorkBuddy, and it automatically ran the entire process for me.

Below are the complete steps of my actual operation; you can follow along.

Step 1: Register for WorkRally

Open http://workrally.qq.com and register by scanning the QR code with WeChat.

After registration, enter the workspace, and you'll see modules like project management and asset library.

Don't worry about these for now; the next step is more important.

Step 2: Get trial credits

After registration, the account has 0 credits. You need to ask customer service for new user trial credits.

After clicking, a QR code will appear. After scanning it with WeChat, a customer service chat will pop up.

I exchanged a few words, and within ten minutes, 300 credits were in my account.

These 300 credits are enough for you to run through a complete four-scene short drama process, which is the 'A Day on Campus' one I made this time. Don't rush to spend them; follow the steps below.

Step 3: Install WorkRally CLI

Open WorkBuddy and enter the following prompt:

https://workrally.qq.com/open-api Can you turn this CLI into a skill and place it in the skills directory under D:\development? First, sort it out, read-only, and I'll confirm before you write.

After the AI read this address, it quickly reached a conclusion.

And installed the CLI.

Step 4: Configure the skill in WorkBuddy

This step is the same as the previous one; the AI did it all for us directly.

It was installed very quickly.

Step 5: Generate a short drama with one sentence

This is the most satisfying step.

Here's how I did it. First, I prepared a photo, a little girl's ID photo. Then I told WorkBuddy:

Use this photo to make a short drama called 'A Day on Campus' for me, with four scenes: breakfast, the way to school, the classroom, and the playground, in a little girl's self-narration style.

Next, WorkBuddy automatically did the following things.

First, it used the photo to generate a multi-view character design sheet, with front, side, and back views all done.

Then it wrote a four-act story script, with each of the four scenes accompanied by a narration from the little girl's perspective. Next, it generated four storyboard images based on the script.

Then, based on each image, it generated four 5-second video clips.

Finally, it automatically dubbed, edited, and composited them.

I just sat by and had a cup of coffee during the whole process.

The run took about three-plus hours. Four scenes, the same little girl, consistent school uniform, consistent expressions, without the uncanny valley effect of an obvious AI generation.

The first draft was indeed still relatively rough, with some details needing polishing. But honestly, I didn't expect it to reach this level.

This isn't a proof of concept; this is a genuinely runnable process. One photo goes in, and a complete short drama with dubbing comes out.

The math works out

I spent about 300 credits in total this time.

Four storyboard images cost about 60 credits, four 5-second videos cost about 200 credits, plus the character design and some retry consumption, exactly 300 credits were used up.

According to the platform's pricing, 10 credits cost 1 yuan, so 300 credits are 30 yuan.

If using the traditional method, hiring an illustrator for storyboards would cost at least two thousand, hiring a photographer to shoot the video would cost at least five thousand, and hiring an editor plus dubbing would be another thousand.

A total of eight thousand yuan, and you'd also need to coordinate the schedules of three people.

Now, this cost is 300 credits plus one afternoon.

Seriously, this comparison is absurd.

The trend is already very clear

What can I say, WorkRally is just the beginning.

If you zoom out and look at the bigger picture, Seedance 2.0's effects are already explosive; ByteDance is putting a lot of effort into video generation.

Grok's video generation is also iterating rapidly, with people on the X platform showing off new effects every day. Domestic platforms like Kling and Vidu are also chasing hard.

The barrier to generating customer acquisition videos with one click will become lower and lower.

Today, making a four-scene short drama with WorkRally still takes an afternoon. In half a year, the same thing will probably take only ten minutes.

In a year, you'll probably be able to produce a ten-minute customer acquisition video with just one sentence, complete with a talking head, subtitles, and background music.

For people wanting to build a personal IP, the window of opportunity is actually very short.

Those who act first will accumulate experience, accumulate fans, and accumulate a feel for it. Waiting until the tools are perfect to enter the game means the front is already crowded.

Lao Yang, over sixty years old, is still running. What reason do you have to wait?

You can go register for a WorkRally account today and give it a try. Ask customer service for 300 trial credits, and spend an afternoon running through it yourself.

It doesn't matter if the first draft is rough; what's important is that you started.

Thinking leads to problems. Doing is the answer.