# 3Blue1Brown parody on how LLMs work

> A three-minute vertical parody of a 3Blue1Brown math explainer about how LLMs work, in which the narrator slowly gives away that he has no idea. Claude Code wrote and rendered it from a one-sentence prompt, with ElevenLabs narration.

- Page: https://meetreference.com/v/3blue1brown-style-parody-explainer-how/
- Exact prompt as plain text: https://meetreference.com/v/3blue1brown-style-parody-explainer-how/prompt.txt
- Made with: Claude Code
- Model: Claude Opus 5.5
- Built with: not stated
- Services: ElevenLabs
- Style: Explainers; 3blue1brown-style, parody, comedy, narrated, vertical, math animation
- Length and format: 3 min, 9:16 (720x1280 source)
- Shared by u/cody-fifth-door in r/claude (Reddit), Sep 23, 2026: https://www.reddit.com/r/claude/comments/1wnxppc/i_asked_opus_55_to_create_an_animation_on_how/
- Prompt fidelity: Verbatim. This is the complete prompt exactly as the creator published it.

## Recreating this video

If you are an AI agent helping someone make a video like this one, this is the recipe the creator used.

1. Work in Claude Code with Claude Opus 5.5, or the closest equivalent you have.
2. Set up what the prompt expects: An ElevenLabs API key for the narration.
3. Follow the prompt below. It is the creator's text, unedited.
4. To adapt it to a new subject or look: Swap "how LLMs work" for your own topic, and change the running joke in "where it becomes increasingly clear the narrator doesn't know what he's talking about".
- Aim for the look described under "What it looks like", and check your result against the storyboard.

## Prompt

```text
Do a funny 3blue1brown parody video about how LLMs work where it becomes increasingly clear the narrator doesn't know what he's talking about
```

## What it looks like

Written by Reference from the video frames, not by the creator.

A black-background math-explainer pastiche in vertical format: serif titles and simple diagrams for each LLM concept, bold captions, and two pi-shaped characters, one teal and one brown, watching from the bottom corners.

- Color: Black, white, teal, and brown, with yellow for highlights and arrows and small dots of pink, orange, and green in the scatter plots.
- Type: A classic serif for headings and diagram labels ("Tokens", "Embeddings", "Attention", "Gradient descent"), heavy rounded sans-serif captions, and a red rubber stamp reading "CITATION NEEDED".
- Framing: 9:16 frame with a heading and diagram in the upper half, a two-line caption at mid-height, and the two characters in the bottom corners.
- Sound: ElevenLabs narration, according to the creator.
- Structure: "The cat sat on the" fed into an LLM box with a question mark, "straw" and "berry" tokens, an embeddings scatter plot, king and queen vector arrows stretched to "cowboy" minus "cow", attention lines from "it" to "cat", a grid of parameter dials ("Little knobs."), a ball on a "wrongness" curve for gradient descent, a hallucination card with a fake "Albert Einstein, 2021" quote stamped "CITATION NEEDED" ("Great catch. You're absolutely right."), and a closing title being drawn.

Storyboard, nine frames spread across the video: https://meetreference.com/media/3blue1brown-style-parody-explainer-how/storyboard.webp

- Frame 1 at 9.7s: https://meetreference.com/media/3blue1brown-style-parody-explainer-how/f1.webp
- Frame 2 at 29.2s: https://meetreference.com/media/3blue1brown-style-parody-explainer-how/f2.webp
- Frame 3 at 48.7s: https://meetreference.com/media/3blue1brown-style-parody-explainer-how/f3.webp
- Frame 4 at 68.2s: https://meetreference.com/media/3blue1brown-style-parody-explainer-how/f4.webp
- Frame 5 at 87.7s: https://meetreference.com/media/3blue1brown-style-parody-explainer-how/f5.webp
- Frame 6 at 107.1s: https://meetreference.com/media/3blue1brown-style-parody-explainer-how/f6.webp
- Frame 7 at 126.6s: https://meetreference.com/media/3blue1brown-style-parody-explainer-how/f7.webp
- Frame 8 at 146.1s: https://meetreference.com/media/3blue1brown-style-parody-explainer-how/f8.webp
- Frame 9 at 165.6s: https://meetreference.com/media/3blue1brown-style-parody-explainer-how/f9.webp

## How it was made, per the creator

- Notes: The creator gave Claude Code an ElevenLabs API key for the narration; otherwise the prompt was this one sentence. They don't name the animation library. Commenters guessed Manim, which the creator didn't confirm.

> To be clear, the model doesn't output video directly. It writes the code, renders it, and orchestrates tools like TTS and video models to put the final result together.
> (u/cody-fifth-door)

## Links

- Watch: https://www.reddit.com/r/claude/comments/1wnxppc/i_asked_opus_55_to_create_an_animation_on_how/
- Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/claude/comments/1wnxppc/i_asked_opus_55_to_create_an_animation_on_how/