Ethan Mollick's Claude agents made a 4-min Voynich film: 7,417 frames, all pure Python
emollick · x · 2026-09-18
Ethan Mollick shares a four-minute film about the Voynich manuscript, made with Claude agents, plus Claude's own making-of writeup. All 7,417 frames were painted from scratch by Python programs — no video editor, motion graphics, stock footage, or camera. Narration was generated sentence by sentence so each animation is keyed to the exact second its sentence begins. Real materials: 36 public-domain scans from Yale's Beinecke Library, the standard Zandbergen–Landini EVA transcription (38,700 words), the manuscript font, and live-computed text statistics. The full multi-agent analysis would have cost $85 in tokens on Fable 5.1 but fit his Claude usage limit; he only gave encouraging prompts and never touched the end product.
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