Generate a full music video from a song and a character brief

John Heibel had Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code storyboard, code and render a complete nine-chapter music video for I'm Upping My P(doom), given only a character design and a request for interesting visuals per lyric.

Done with

Claude Code

ReportedSep 22, 2026

What they did

According to the repo README, the video was made in two generations, both in Claude Code: a first pass on Opus 5.5 Medium, kept in a legacy folder, and a second on Opus 5.5 that produced everything else. The only direction given was to use the Clawd character design and to give each lyric interesting visuals and transitions; after the first generation the author also asked for p5.brush strokes and for every scene to flow into the next. Opus wrote a shot-by-shot storyboard, then an animation guide it used to brief sub-agents running in parallel, one per chapter. Every frame is painted with p5.js in headless Chrome and the render script encodes the MP4 with ffmpeg. The author says no scene ideas came from him.

How it went

The finished video is on YouTube and the repository, with about 2,100 stars when checked, contains everything needed to re-render it from the nine chapter files. The README gives no token cost, wall-clock time or count of failed attempts. The author has since published a separate, more general base for making Claude animations the same way, which he describes as more reliable, suggesting the first approach needed rework to be reusable.

Worth knowing

The song is not the author's: it comes from a 2024 Udio generation found on YouTube, with lyric interpretations from a third party. Rendering needs Node, Chrome and ffmpeg and paints frame by frame, so budget time for it. This account is a README rather than a write-up: it states what was given and what came out, not what went wrong along the way.

Try it yourself withTry it withClaude Code

5 parts to fill in

Make a music video for [this song file] with the lyrics in [lyrics.txt]. Use [this character design] throughout. First write a shot-by-shot storyboard that gives each lyric its own visual idea and makes every scene transition into the next, and show it to me before writing any code. Then write a short animation style guide and implement each chapter as a separate [p5.js] scene, with a render script that paints frames in headless Chrome and encodes an MP4 with ffmpeg. Render a [10-second] preview of chapter one and stop for my feedback before rendering the rest.

Square brackets are the parts to fill in. The prompt is ours; the story is theirs.