Building 'Night Signal', a lost-media horror broadcast, with Claude, Codex and a custom Canvas pipeline
zndr-cs · reddit · 2026-10-09
A Redditor unveiled Night Signal, a "lost media" horror broadcast set in a video shop where three hosts endlessly review horror films—dropped into "Broadcast #4235" with zero backstory.
The pipeline:
- Script & characters: dialogue co-written with Claude/Codex from real conversations; characters carry living memories across episodes.
- Voices: generated locally with open-source TTS Chatterbox, blending the author's and a friend's recordings with synthetic voices; every line verified via Whisper speech-to-text with auto-regeneration on errors.
- Art: GPT image generation for sets, characters, and separate animation parts (heads, mouths, eyes, brows), iteratively briefed and revised.
- Animation: no AI video—a custom HTML Canvas 2D engine with Rhubarb Lip Sync, blinks, head turns and idle motion; camera cuts driven by script markup.
- Broadcast feel: CRT static, VHS title cards, rain, audio filtering, theremin theme—all synthesized in code, no samples.
- Rendering: parallel frame rendering assembled with ffmpeg, word-level caption timing, git-versioned revisions.
The pilot took days; now rendering an episode takes minutes, with the goal of a semi-automated script-to-broadcast pipeline producing an episode in about an hour.
More from Multimodal
- GPT-6 Luna Shows Surprising Skill at Spotting AI-Generated Images — Angaisb_ · 2026-10-09
- KAIST's LongTake: long-horizon teacher forcing keeps 30-60s video generation dynamic — kaist-ai · 2026-10-09
- AI image of the day: GPT-6 Image 2.5 recreates 1940s Chinese village newsreel — DeryaTR_ · 2026-10-09
- Vigglorious Studio: chunked reference frames and guide keyframes fix character drift in long AI videos — Tablaski · 2026-10-09
- Star Wars AI songs strike again: Qui-Gon gets his own 'Gin and Juice' anthem — aronchick · 2026-10-09
- MiniMax H3 zombie short film goes viral on Reddit — gabxav · 2026-10-09