# Clawd rides a star-whale in watercolour

> A two-minute storybook music video in p5.js watercolour in which Clawd rides a star-whale and meets an owl. Opus 5.5 in Claude Code made it from one sentence inside the ClaudeAnimationBase kit: about 2 hours of unattended work, then 49 minutes of rendering.

- Page: https://meetreference.com/v/one-prompt-watercolour-music-video-clawd/
- Exact prompt as plain text: https://meetreference.com/v/one-prompt-watercolour-music-video-clawd/prompt.txt
- Made with: Claude Code
- Model: Claude Opus 5.5
- Built with: ClaudeAnimationBase, p5.js, p5.brush, Headless Chrome, FFmpeg
- Services: Suno
- Style: Music videos; watercolour, storybook, hand-painted, lyric-synced, character animation, whimsical, p5.js
- Length and format: 2 min, 16:9 (1280x720 source)
- Shared by yan wang in YouTube, Sep 30, 2026: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShfA4KRLSyM
- 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: A clone of github.com/JohnHeibel/ClaudeAnimationBase with npm install (the prompt relies on its ANIMATION_GUIDE.md); Node.js, Google Chrome, and ffmpeg; Your song as assets/song.mp3, with lyric timings in assets/lyrics.txt.
3. Follow the prompt below. It is the creator's text, unedited.
4. To adapt it to a new subject or look: Point "assets/song.mp3" and "assets/lyrics.txt" at your own song and lyric timings; the rest of the sentence can stay. For a short clip without a song, the kit's own warm-up prompt replaces the music-video request with "make a 15-second video of Clawd trying to catch a butterfly."
- Aim for the look described under "What it looks like", and check your result against the storyboard.

## Prompt

```text
Read ANIMATION_GUIDE.md, then make a music video for assets/song.mp3 (the lyrics and their timings are in assets/lyrics.txt): work out the tempo and structure yourself, storyboard it, build every shot, check your work with contact sheets, and render out/video.mp4 with the audio.
```

## What it looks like

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

A storybook night in watercolour. Clawd, a small orange block with legs, works with a paintbrush among the stars and rides a whale over the hills, while an owl at a laptop watches the same scene on screen.

- Color: Indigo and violet night washes, cream paper, Clawd's tangerine orange, teal and green hills, butter-yellow stars, and a pink-and-peach sunset in the window.
- Type: Lyrics only, in small white sans-serif subtitles on a dark translucent box at the bottom center.
- Framing: Wide, flat tableaux with ink outlines and visible brush texture. Clawd stays small against long horizon lines, and the owl at its desk frames the opening and closing scenes.
- Sound: The song "One Prompt", with lyrics by Claude and music made with Suno, according to the creator.
- Structure: An owl at a desk beside a blank laptop, Clawd on a cream page under a paintbrush, Clawd painting stars into a dark sky, riding the star-whale over hills, posing in sunglasses by a tall window panel, back at the owl's desk with the scene now on the laptop, a sunset window full of stars, and an iris shot framing Clawd with a heart.

Storyboard, nine frames spread across the video: https://meetreference.com/media/one-prompt-watercolour-music-video-clawd/storyboard.webp

- Frame 1 at 37.6s: https://meetreference.com/media/one-prompt-watercolour-music-video-clawd/f1.webp
- Frame 2 at 50.8s: https://meetreference.com/media/one-prompt-watercolour-music-video-clawd/f2.webp
- Frame 3 at 64.1s: https://meetreference.com/media/one-prompt-watercolour-music-video-clawd/f3.webp
- Frame 4 at 77.3s: https://meetreference.com/media/one-prompt-watercolour-music-video-clawd/f4.webp
- Frame 5 at 90.5s: https://meetreference.com/media/one-prompt-watercolour-music-video-clawd/f5.webp
- Frame 6 at 103.7s: https://meetreference.com/media/one-prompt-watercolour-music-video-clawd/f6.webp
- Frame 7 at 116.9s: https://meetreference.com/media/one-prompt-watercolour-music-video-clawd/f7.webp
- Frame 8 at 130.2s: https://meetreference.com/media/one-prompt-watercolour-music-video-clawd/f8.webp
- Frame 9 at 143.4s: https://meetreference.com/media/one-prompt-watercolour-music-video-clawd/f9.webp

## How it was made, per the creator

- One-shot: yes, a single prompt with no follow-ups
- Agent time: About 2 hours of unattended agent work, then 49 minutes of rendering on a MacBook Air M2 with 4 parallel workers
- Notes: Run on xhigh effort on a Claude Max plan, with no follow-ups. The song "One Prompt" (lyrics by Claude, music by Suno) went in assets/ with its lyric timings beside it. Claude measured the tempo, storyboarded 26 shots, invented an owl and a star-whale, checked every shot on contact sheets, and rendered 2,870 frames. The upload opens with a sped-up view of the process; the music video itself runs from 0:31 to 2:30.

> I gave Claude Opus 5.5 one prompt in Claude Code and it made this whole music video.
> (yan wang)

## Links

- Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShfA4KRLSyM
- Original post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShfA4KRLSyM
- Companion page with the prompt and a how-to guide: https://pdoomvideo.com/opus-5-5-video/
- ClaudeAnimationBase starter kit: https://github.com/JohnHeibel/ClaudeAnimationBase
- 38-second vertical cut: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ee-IVBvXnYE