What they did
Ahmed Oublihi makes animated YouTube Shorts with Claude Code and no video model. Claude writes each 31 to 38 second film as HTML and JavaScript, the HyperFrames tool renders the frames in a headless browser, and ffmpeg joins them into an MP4 on the author's own machine. Claude also checks its own rendered frames and fixes what looks wrong. To stop every film looking the same, the author wrote style kits: folders with a palette, character drawing rules, scene templates, motion rules and a checklist Claude grades its stills against before drawing. A second developer, Ahmad Dogar, built a similar Claude Code skill called reel-studio for vertical ads, with scripts and images from ChatGPT through the Codex CLI, ElevenLabs voices, music found through Claude in Chrome, Playwright frame capture and local whisper.cpp for caption timing.
How it went
Between October 15 and 23 the author made eight Shorts. Six came to $4.10 to $6.90 each at Opus list prices, including the self-check rounds. Two cost $23 and $24 because they were thrown away and rebuilt. On a 6-core server with Sonnet, a 10 second Short took about 3.8 minutes from empty folder to MP4 and a 30 second film about 14 minutes. The author runs it on a flat subscription, so these are list-price estimates. The reel-studio author rendered an 18 second, 30 fps reel in 26 seconds on an M1 Pro.
Worth knowing
Per clip it costs about the same as a paid video model; the win is that fixing a label or a line is a free local re-render. The expensive runs came from skipping cheap checks: approve a shot list first and look at still frames before the full render. It only suits drawn styles such as cartoons, diagrams and motion graphics, not realistic people. Both authors sell or promote related products.