My short film - Paper Plane

Allan Durhuus

9d • 🏆 Wins

Hi everyone!

I had to share my latest project. I am so proud of it and hope you enjoy it!

Thanks to

@Jake Van Clief

and his crew for creating the community. I feel like nothing is impossible to create.

I had Claude code write the next part:

I gave Claude one sentence. Two days later it was a 9.5 minute animated film.

My idea was one line: "a child's room where different art styles are used." What came out is "The paper plane": a 9 minute 31 second animated film with 25 art styles, 8 narrator voices and an original soundtrack. Not one image or video generator was used. Every frame is drawn in code. Here is how it came together, and why ICM is the reason it worked.

THE IDEA

I had a folder of 84 reference art styles (sumi-e ink, claymation, film noir, Win95, synthwave and so on) and one picture in my head: a child's room where every object is a door into another style. The camera dives into the TV and you are inside a video game. The poster on the wall turns out to be a whole world. One style draws an arcade machine, and inside it the next style is already playing.

THE BRAINSTORM

Claude ran a structured brainstorm with me (the superpowers brainstorming skill): one question at a time, and a quick mockup of the room so I could see the camera route. Out of that came four "hand-off moves" that join one style to the next:

- Dive in: through a screen into its world.

- Drawn doorway: my arcade idea.

- Pull back out: the world was the poster on the wall all along.

- Carried thread: something crosses the seam from one style to the next.

Then Claude pitched me three stories:

1. The paper plane: a plane that flies from style to style.

2. The bedtime question: a child asks something, and the room answers.

3. How pictures learned to move: from shadow puppets to 3D games.

I loved all three and could not pick one. So I asked Claude to weave them into one story, and to drop the 2 to 3 minute limit we had planned, because a great story needs time to play out.

That became the film. At bedtime a child writes "How do you make a picture move?" on a page, folds it into a paper plane and throws it at the lamp. The lamp answers with a story, and the plane carries the question through the whole history of moving pictures. Every world redraws the plane in its own medium: an ink stroke, a woodcut, clay, a pixel sprite, liquid chrome, a constellation. In the morning the child draws a little plane on every page of a sketchbook, flips the pages fast, and the plane flies off the page and out of the window.

HOW THE BUILD WORKS IN CLAUDE CODE

- Design first. The brainstorm became a written design document. I approved it before anything was built.

- Then a plan, carried out by subagents. The main Claude session acts as the director and hands each task to a subagent with the right model for the job: Opus for writing, art and reviews, Sonnet for tooling and tests, Haiku for searching. Every art style got its own review (does it match the spec, is the code sound, does the art read as its medium) before it counted.

- A test piece before the real thing. A small silent slice (the room, one dive into the shadow theatre and back) proved the hard parts before 25 worlds were built on top.

- Then act by act. Six parts: a prologue, four acts and an epilogue. Each part went through the same stages: script, voice, storyboard, scene, render. Each act was finished and approved by me before the next one was written.

- The voice drives the timing. The script is spoken first, transcribed word by word, and every picture is pinned to an exact word. So the shadow puppet lands on "shadow", and the "24" lands on "twenty-four".

- Trust grew along the way. After act 1 I told Claude: "I put the creative trust in you." From then on I approved each act up front and judged the finished export. Act 3 became my favourite, because it is the best at weaving styles together.

- Claude cannot hear. So it measured instead: voice levels, sync, the plane never jumping or vanishing at a seam. My own listen was the real check, and I did catch one bug: the full film broke at 7:20. Claude found the cause (a render worker lost its graphics under load), fixed the renderer and re-rendered.

OUTSIDE APPS

Only one outside service: ElevenLabs, for the eight voices. Seven come from the ElevenLabs voice library. The monk was designed from a text description with ElevenLabs Voice Design, and I picked from three previews. No voice is cloned from a real person.

Everything else is free tools that Claude installs and drives itself: Python, headless Chromium (renders the film frame by frame), ffmpeg (mixes the sound and encodes the video) and Whisper running locally (finds the exact time of every spoken word).

The music is an original lullaby composed in code. It travels with the plane and changes instrument in every world: a music box in the room, koto in the woodblock print, smoky jazz piano in film noir, chiptune in the arcade. No audio files, no stock footage, no AI images or video.

THE ICM FOLDER STRUCTURE

explain-animation-videos/

CLAUDE.md the front door: "read AGENTS.md"

AGENTS.md the router: which file to read for which job

CONTEXT.md the pipeline: 5 stages and their gates

START-HERE.md setup and first run

stages/ one contract per stage, read on every run

01_script/CONTEXT.md

02_voice/CONTEXT.md

03_storyboard/CONTEXT.md

04_scene/CONTEXT.md

05_render/CONTEXT.md

_shared/ what every stage uses

house-rules.md my taste and the craft rules

voices.md the cast of 8 voices

worlds.md how a reference style becomes a world

handoffs.md the 4 hand-off moves

music.md the lullaby and its instrument per world

vocab.txt spellings for the transcript

Learn/ 84 reference styles, read only

worlds/ 25 worlds, one folder per style

sumi-e-ink-wash/ world.js + card.md

...

_runtime/ player, camera and hand-offs, music engine, fonts

_templates/video/ copied for each new video

videos/

paper-plane/

01_script/ 02_voice/ 03_storyboard/ 04_scene/ 05_render/

REVIEW.md the gate log: every approval, with its date

docs/ design, plans, decisions

anim.py the toolchain: speak, transcribe, cues, stills, render

tests/ 400 tests

Why this matters:

- The folder is the architecture. Each stage reads the output of the stage before it, writes its own, and stops for me.

- One home per rule. My taste lives in house-rules.md, the cast in voices.md, the state of the film in REVIEW.md. Nothing is written twice, so nothing goes out of sync.

- The memory lives in the folders, not in the chat. Every act started in a fresh Claude session and picked up exactly where the last one stopped, because REVIEW.md says what is approved and CONTEXT.md says what comes next.

- The workspace is reusable. The pipeline came from an earlier ICM workspace of mine, and this one can make the next film from the same 84 styles.

BY THE NUMBERS

- 9:31 film, 1280x720, 30 fps

- 25 of the 84 styles, 131 cues pinned to spoken words

- 8 voices, 1 original lullaby

- About 20,000 lines of drawing and animation code, 400 tests, 125 commits

- About two days from the brainstorm to my final approval

WHAT I WOULD TELL YOU

- Do not choose between good ideas too early. Merging the three stories was the best decision in the whole project.

- Build a small test first. The slice found the hard problems while they were still cheap.

- Gates beat long prompts. Approving one act at a time kept a 9 minute film on track.

- Put the memory in files. A fresh session that can read the folder is worth more than one long chat.