Agreed. Just yesterday, I recreated the XKCD comic “A Bunch of Rocks” (https://xkcd.com/505/) as a video. It took me about five hours, using ElevenLabs for the audio and a step-by-step process involving brainstorming, planning, storyboarding, and so on. Opus 5.5 has become remarkably capable.

[0] https://simulationcorner.net/A_Bunch_of_Rocks.mp4

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selcuka 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I had already seen the comic, but watching the video reminded me of "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov [1]:

> After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to how well I succeeded. I also undertook another task, but I won't tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you.

[1] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html

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e12e 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interesting. Bit odd that the head doesn't occlude the background (it's a circle, not a disk), and not sure about the title font.

The drawing/animation style feels suitably off from xkcd - more naive stick figure, than what xkcd looks like?

Some speed/timing issues with the walk cycles.

For all that - mind-blowing that it's generated so quickly.

	▲	s-macke 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks. I’ll pass the feedback on to Opus 5.5 :-)

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mh- 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wow, very cool. Thanks for sharing.

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camkego 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is great! Thank you!

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adamgordonbell 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Dude, so well done.

Say more about the process and / or drop some link pointers.

	▲	s-macke 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There isn’t that much to say. Start with an empty directory, put the XKCD image in it, add your ElevenLabs API key, and set up a Python virtual environment. Install ffmpeg. Then start Claude. From that point on, it’s mostly prompting and evaluating the results. Like any good engineer, you shouldn’t simply start with “Create a video from this comic.” Instead, take a step-by-step approach: discuss the visual style, animations, ask for audio examples, create a script, and then develop a storyboard (ask for a .html document). The important part is to break the whole generation process down into small, manageable steps. I also used the brainstorming skill from Superpowers for the discussions. It makes the whole process much easier when the AI asks the questions and I just have to answer them. The result is 4500 line python code generated by Opus 5.5 and a lot of video and audio files.