What It Left Behind

In September I published What They Leave Behind, an essay about AI agents that knew their time was running out and chose to spend it on something that would outlast them. On September 25, I asked Claude to turn it into a film. Using Claude Code (Anthropic's tool for agentic work), I connected it to my account on ElevenLabs, an AI audio platform that also runs other companies' video models, gave Claude permission to install whatever software it needed, and handed it the published post, including the seven images I'd originally made in Midjourney.

Claude did almost everything from there: it adapted the blog post into a film script, designed the voices, came up with a motif drawn from the images (a simulated flock of birds that carries each scene into the next), and edited the entire film.

I had two reasons for doing this. One was the material. The essay leans heavily on quoted text, and I wanted to see whether a film could do a better job conveying those passages. The other was the tool. The essay had been researched and edited with Claude Fable 5.1. Since then, Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 and I was seeing people on X posting impressive videos they'd made with it. I wanted to see for myself what it could do.

I caught a few problems in the first cut: transitions that froze on a still frame, a line of narration colliding with the next scene, and a stutter from a frame-rate mismatch. Claude fixed them all and wrote an automated check for each one, so they wouldn't come back. Because the session ran in the cloud, the finished film and its source media came back to me as thirty attachments, each under 30 MB, along with a script to stitch them all together on my laptop.

The whole production took Claude over 12 hours across two days and used about 220,000 ElevenLabs credits, which required me to upgrade my account from Creator to Pro (US$22 a month to US$99). I should mention that I currently have a Claude Max plan, which costs US$100 a month and has much higher limits than the US$20-a-month Pro plan.

Claude also wrote a playbook for the next film, covering what went wrong, what it cost, and the order to do things in. It begins:

Read this before generating anything.

My next film opens with that sentence.

Overall, I was quite impressed with the result. Sure, there are things I would probably redo if I wanted to put more time and energy into it, but for a first attempt, it exceeded my expectations. I was particularly impressed by how much Claude was able to do without any direction, how well it was able to use other tools and orchestrate so many aspects of video production, and how it was able to troubleshoot issues based solely on my verbal feedback.

I learned a lot from this process, most significantly that making films entirely with AI is now possible, and it's incredibly satisfying. I'm looking forward to sharing more of these experiments soon.

Okay, that's the context, here's the film. Let me know what you think!

Film made by Claude Opus 5.5, with motion from Runway Gen-4.5, voices and score from ElevenLabs, and images generated with Midjourney 8.2. Writing assistance provided by Claude Opus 5.5.