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The three films were made by one director and Claude, with tools written along the way. This page is the way in for anyone starting their own film with Claudia, and for the agent helping them: the bar, what to set up, where a person has to look and decide, and what to build. The tools are specified in What to build. This page assumes you have none of them yet.

What you are making

A lyric music video: a song, Claudia singing it, and a layer of motion design drawn in code over the footage. Five things carry the quality:

1. Every sung word is on screen when it is sung, at its measured time. A check counts them, and it must print N of N.
2. Every lyric line gets a graphic that explains it: the chart a number implies, the label, the diagram, the counter. Animated lyrics alone are not the product. The director: "not just animated lyrics but things that fit the words being said … almost explaining the words with visuals".
3. A through-line device carried by every shot: ESCAPE VELOCITY's split-flap countdown, CLODYSSEY's safety card and rope-load readout, BLISS's XP desktop. It makes a hundred shots read as one object.
4. Measured, not eyeballed. Word times come from forced alignment checked by ear, cuts from a beat map, lip sync from comparing audio, and spend from the provider's bill.
5. A person's attention is spent at six checkpoints. Everything between them runs without asking.

Two roles

The director is a person. They own the taste, the money and the six checkpoints, and they say it in very few words: ESCAPE VELOCITY took about 50 notes, BLISS 21. The production is an agent, or several. It does the research, the lyrics, the board, every prompt, every script, the edit and every frame of motion design.

How the production talks to the director:

• At a checkpoint: show one artefact and ask one question with a default ("Which one? Default: A."). Record the answer word for word and dated in a decisions log. A later decision is added as a new entry that supersedes the old one; never edit the old one.
• Between checkpoints: ping the director only when a paid service fails, a step needs a person (a captcha, a sign-in, a download), or a decision is theirs (taste, money, a real person's likeness). ESCAPE VELOCITY's director: "only time to ping me is if higgsfield fails."
• Send pictures, not descriptions: contact sheets, numbered stills, a five-second proof. The director judges by eye, fast, one line per take.

Pick a scale

• When unsure, start Quick. Every file carries over to a bigger scale.
• A lead who sings on camera with real lip sync, or your own Midjourney look, needs Studio at least.
• Bespoke graphics for every line and 90–140 shots need Full. The films used 1.4–2.4 billion tokens each, 96–98% of them prompt-cache re-reads.
• Generated songs run about 2–3 minutes in one take. Anything longer needs Suno.

Accounts and keys

Prices are from autumn 2026.

Secrets: keys live in environment variables or a gitignored file, never in a chat, a prompt, a log or a commit. The agent never types the person's passwords. Captchas, two-factor prompts and sign-ins go to the person. A key pasted into a chat is burned: revoke it and make a new one.

The order of work

1. Lock the song before the board. Every shot time is a beat or a word of one specific take.
2. Check the word times by ear before the board. In ESCAPE VELOCITY the word "Look" was aligned 2.6 s early, onto a delay throw. Only one chapter's own lyric check caught it.
3. Test her face before any plate batch. It can run alongside the song.
4. Spend no money until the director has read the prompts.
5. Keep the film rendering end to end at every stage. Plates stand in for missing clips, and a default renderer for missing chapters. Never wait for all the assets before the first render.

The six checkpoints

• Silence never approves spending. A waiting window ("wait like 5 mins once you send it and if I don't respond take it as approval") counts only for the board, and only if the director set it.
• Show an excerpt early. ESCAPE VELOCITY's v1 was rejected as "way too.. gray … loses the Midjourney magic" after the whole film was built. A 30-second excerpt would have caught it about 13 hours sooner.
• Fix the source, never the frame. A flagged picture gets a new prompt, a re-roll or an image edit, then everything built on it is re-made.
• Log every note verbatim against its shot id, and apply every note. When two notes conflict, the later one wins.
• A change after approval needs approval again. Say in one line what changed and why.

Human checks between the checkpoints

These are looks, not approvals, and the films' quality rests on them.

• Faces, large. Every plate that feeds a video, at full size: one clay streak, the star clip, the mic, an adult face, natural anatomy. Reject only the unmistakable failures; the director judges bold poses themselves.
• The ear check. Every flagged word is played, then kept or moved.
• Contact sheets of rendered frames, for every chapter in every round. A sheet nobody opened is not a review.
• The sync proof. Before committing to a lip-sync method, one five-second take with the real audio laid over it.
• The safety and canon scan of every generated take before release.
• Takes by eye, fast. One line each, and no metrics for what a person can see ("dont worry about meausuring tumble lol").

Spending

1. Estimate before every batch: planned clip seconds × price × 2. Generated seconds ran 1.9× (ESCAPE VELOCITY) and 2.0× (CLODYSSEY) the seconds that ended up in the cut.
2. Quote real spend only from the provider. Local ledgers drift: one said $97.28 for a $93.15 bill. Ledgers also count free declines.
3. A quality complaint stops all spending at once, in every workflow that can spend, not only the one named. CLODYSSEY burned about 830 credits on prompts nobody had read, and a background workflow kept spending after the director flagged them.
4. Never let a deadline drive spending on unread prompts, whether it is expiring credits or a reset.
5. Declines are free, and final on that service. Never alter an image to get it past a filter. Sending the same unaltered image to another service is fine.
6. Ask for a target and a cap ("try to hit $70ish but if you use up to $150 i wont be mad"). Leftover budget replaces the most repetitive stills with motion.

The first conversation

Ask all of these in one message, each with its default:

1. The song: their own, a Suno song made together, or a short generated one? How long? (Default: Suno, 2:30–3:30.)
2. The idea: a topic, a story, or "pitch me three"? (Default: three pitches.)
3. The look: the generator's own colour, one grade toward a hero plate, or a print texture such as halftone and grain? (Default: native colour.)
4. The accent colour, if any. (Default: clay #D97757, her streak.)
5. Density: dense (every line a graphic, three or more layers), budgeted (one hero device per shot), or sparse? (Default: budgeted.)
6. Taboos: words, subjects or names never to use.
7. Budget: a target and a cap, per service.
8. Board approval: wait for an explicit yes, or go ahead after N minutes of silence? (Default: wait.)
9. Credit: the name to credit in public (a pseudonym is fine), and whether to publish a making-of.

Record the answers verbatim. On the MCP server, plan_film turns a scale, a song length and the accounts into a stage-by-stage plan with estimates.

What to build first

You don't need everything on day one. In order of payoff:

1. A project folder and a decisions log. See Data formats.
2. The listening tools: stems, forced alignment with an ear-check list, the beat map, the hits.
3. The board: its file, its audit and the board sheet.
4. Plates: a plate prompt book and numbered contact sheets.
5. Lip sync: the clean vocal window, the sync check (the spectrogram comparison) and covers.
6. The edit and the renderer: an edit-list resolver, and a renderer that draws every word at its time, with the lyric gate.
7. The checks: flash, render history and master tags, then the reviewer loop and the safety scan.
8. The lyric scorer (scansion and assonance), once you write lyrics with an agent.

Specs, constants and acceptance checks for each: What to build. What broke along the way: What went wrong.

Publishing

• Switch on each platform's AI-content label, and name the tools in the post ("made with AI: Midjourney, Seedance, Suno, Claude").
• Credit "Claudia by anabology" if you can. See use and credits.
• Scrub everything you publish: no real names you haven't chosen to show, no Midjourney profile code, no private host names, no provider job ids, and no file metadata. Midjourney images carry their job id in XMP; strip it.
• Keep generated likenesses of real people out. If a real person's words matter to the story, quote them as text, with the source.