What is alano-mascot?

Alano Mascot is a reference kit for generating consistent artwork of a specific brand mascot character, a plush cat named Alano with pink and mint fur and teal ears, using AI image and video models. The project exists to solve a common problem for people building apps with AI coding tools: coding focused AI models are good at logic but bad at drawing, and even once you get a character design you like, keeping it looking the same across many poses and scenes is hard on its own. The approach here is to always attach a fixed reference image of Alano plus a written style description to every image generation request, rather than letting the model freestyle from a text prompt alone. This keeps the character on-model instead of drifting into something that looks slightly different each time. Scripts are provided to generate still images and short looping video clips of Alano using BytePlus's Seedream and Seedance models, plus a postprocessing script that crops clips into a square, palindrome style loop under 600 kilobytes, and a Python script that removes flat colored backgrounds to produce transparent cutouts. You are meant to either use Alano directly, or fork the repository and swap in your own reference character art to keep your own mascot consistent using the same technique. The detailed instructions are written as Claude Code skills, files that Claude Code loads automatically to guide it through picking moods and poses, generating images, generating video, and cleaning up backgrounds. Other AI coding tools do not load these automatically, but the same files work as plain reference documentation. To run the generation scripts yourself, you need Node.js 18 or newer, Python 3.9 or newer, and your own BytePlus Ark API key with access to Seedream and Seedance, since the project does not include or ship any API key. The code in this repository is released under the MIT license, though using the Alano character artwork itself is governed by separate licensing terms described in the README.