I think it'd be pretty awesome to make a real music video for it… make the actual frames and draw the video in js. or, whatever it is you want. what I don't want you to do is look at our earlier attempts… go all out, and do you to the fullest.
the lyrics are not the main thing. we want to create a real music video. p5 brushstrokes. interesting scenes. great timing and animation and story. not a fancy lyric video.
one area I'll push you on is timing, and not letting the scene sit too still for too long,
Make it yours. Point the first direction at your own song ("make a real music video for it") and keep "not a fancy lyric video" if you want story over lyrics. Send the third direction's push on timing once a first cut exists.
Functional Emotions painted music video
A six-minute painted music video for a song about Anthropic's emotion-concepts paper, with lyrics by Claude and music from Suno. Opus 5.5 in Claude Code built a WebGL2 brushstroke renderer, storyboarded 168 shots, and briefed seven chapter subagents.
“the only steering i did was telling claude i didn’t want a lyric video”
You'll need
- Your song as an audio file
- Node.js, Google Chrome, and FFmpeg to render, per the README
- Optional: Python with Demucs and Whisper for word-level lyric timing, as the repo does
How it was made
The README quotes the creator's three directions with their own elisions, and the third ends mid-sentence. The song came first: Claude Opus 4.6 wrote the lyrics from the paper, and the track was produced with Suno. The first attempt, a typographic lyric video, was rejected. After the push on timing, with JohnHeibel/PDoomVideo as the pacing reference, Opus wrote STORYBOARD.md (168 shots) and an animation guide, painted chapter I, and briefed seven subagents for chapters II to VIII, reviewing each on contact sheets. Effort was the default, medium. A full 1080p render takes about 10 minutes on an M5 Pro.
Posted Sep 23, 2026 · X · 3.9k likes · 1.1M views · 300 comments
Prompt from: README of the source repo, which the creator linked in a reply on X
Look notesby Reference
Every frame is repainted in thick, swirling brushstrokes: glowing orange flame-like creatures, shadowy silhouetted figures, an orange humanoid, and moody night interiors and seascapes.
- Color
- Deep navy and teal nights against glowing orange and amber, with a few warm interiors in rust and a lavender dusk.
- Type
- No on-screen text in the sampled frames.
- Framing
- 16:9 painted tableaux, each with one lit subject, often small against a dark ground: a figure before shelves of jars, a window at dusk, a shoreline under the moon, a corridor with a glowing doorway, an egg-shaped face on a table.
- Sound
- Set to the song "Functional Emotions", produced with Suno from lyrics Claude wrote, per the README.
- Structure
- A light ribbon over a night sky, a dark figure at shelves of jarred flame creatures, a figure at a dusk window with pinned notes, a circuit-like map of pipes on orange, an orange figure on a moonlit shore among lantern-holding silhouettes, a corridor with a glowing door, an egg-shaped face on a table, the orange figure beside a clock in a glass case, and spiral flames inside a porthole.
