Claude Code directed the most boring movie ever made: full pipeline breakdown for $16.87
Greedy-Giraffe-4269 · reddit · 2026-09-25
A developer handed Claude Code (Opus 5.5) a joke script — five characters forced to watch a sock puppet face a beige wall for 7h46m — and let it run the entire production for $16.87 against a $20 cap.
Pipeline
- One long Claude Code session, OpenRouter as the gateway, only ffmpeg/Python/Pillow/local Whisper; no video editor opened
- Screen shots in grainy 16mm via Veo 3.1 Lite ($0.05/s); puppet reaction shots via Kling v3 Pro ($0.168/s, native lip-sync)
- Gemini 3 Pro Image ($0.14/still) produced the character sheet and each shot's first frame; every video is image-to-video from a checked still for character consistency
A custom runner vid.py: JSON shot list, 4 parallel jobs, cost logging, skip-existing shots so reshoots take one flag; main batch of 14 shots cost $10.77
Failure fixes: goose drift fixed with first+last frame locking; Kling's gibberish wall text cropped out; drawtext-less ffmpeg worked around with frame-by-frame Pillow overlays; missing audio tracks patched with a projector-whirr bed
Self-checks: Whisper word-timestamp transcription verifies dialogue, frame sheets check continuity, and a brightness-independent normalized cross-correlation verified the author's surname was gone across 538 frames with zero residue.
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