Claude Code directed a full music video: 6.5 hours, 765M input tokens
colinmcnamara · x · 2026-10-21
A Reddit user had Claude Code (Opus 5.5) make an entire papercraft-style music video with no Premiere or After Effects.
How it worked: Claude wrote its own papercraft animation engine in JavaScript, drawing every frame on a canvas synced to song time, then headless Chrome rendered all 6,234 frames into ffmpeg. Character assets came from ChatGPT Imagen2 and NanoBanana Pro; it split stems with demucs, got word timings with whisper, did face detection so text avoids faces, and handled all scenes — the human only gave notes.
Numbers: 6h20m from first prompt to finished 1080p, 35 sub-agents, 4,046 tool calls, 2.28M output tokens, 765M input tokens (97% cache hits on a Max 20x plan).
What went wrong: accidentally starting on Opus 4.8 was so bad the project was wiped and restarted; first render was clipart-ugly with a speech balloon coming out the wrong end; screenshot scripts left 180 headless Chrome processes running until Claude added cleanup; a whole-drive search triggered a bluescreen (likely a bad vJOY driver).
What made it work: giving Claude "eyes" — any frame renderable to PNG plus contact sheets so agents check their own work; 8 "artist" agents redrew bad shots, 7 "reviewer" agents found 124 problems, and a fix team cleaned up overnight.
Limits: only this cut-out paper-puppet style works — still images and low-frame animation, not real character animation or live action.
Related event: Claude Code Autonomously Directs a Stop-Motion Music Video in 6.5 Hours(2 posts)→
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