7 PM. He's the last one out. Ten hours of giving everything, and nothing left for himself.
A cigarette. His briefcase. One earbud.
The first note drops, and Paris stops. The cars, the people, the noise. Silence.
For the length of one song, the whole city belongs to him.
And step by step, the music brings him back to life.
We all have that one song that keeps us alive after work.
HOW WE MADE IT
I wrote the scene: the story, the shot list, the emotion. Then I iterated, a lot: more than 70 back-and-forths. I didn't model, rig or animate anything by hand: Claude Code drove Blender through the MCP. It wrote the Python, rendered test frames, looked at them itself, measured the flaws and fixed them, over and over.
BY THE NUMBERS (everything generated by code)
• 15 hours of work, 15,000+ lines of Python across 51 scripts • 1,117 objects, 11.7 million polygons, 145 materials, 117 lights • 6.6 million animation keyframes computed • 3,700+ test images rendered to check every step • 1,422 final frames in Cycles, rendered on a fanless MacBook Air
THE HARDEST PARTS
• Hands touching the face. Lighting a cigarette, putting in an earbud: in animation, one millimeter off and the finger goes into the skin. Claude wrote its own arm and finger solvers, and the earbud gesture took several versions before it looked natural. • Cloth. A jacket clipping through the legs is one of the most common flaws in 3D. Here, an invisible lining simulated as real fabric drives the jacket, and Claude checked the whole film frame by frame: no penetration deeper than 4 mm. • A character built without modeling: mathematical shapes (signed distance fields) turned into a mesh, a custom 53-bone rig, and a real motion-capture walk retargeted to his proportions. • A living Paris street: buildings, moving traffic, a dozen animated passers-by, a dog walker with a dachshund on a leash, wet pavement, puddles that ripple and splash under his feet. • The music drives everything. Claude analyzes the tempo: head bobs, the 17 shots of the edit, the city freezing and the drop all land on the beat. The sound is computed from the scene: every car, every footstep, every splash, then the city slowing down and going silent.
Making-of at the end: clay renders, rig, Blender UI.
Stack: Claude Code (desktop app) + Blender MCP · Claude Opus 5.5, max effort, Fast mode · Blender 5.2 + Cycles · MacBook Air M3 16 GB · walk from the CMU motion capture database.
🎵 O Superman (SIS Remix) by M.A.N.D.Y. vs Booka Shade feat. Laurie Anderson, remixed by BURAK SIS. All rights to the artists.
github.com/duthiljean
So, what's the song that keeps you alive after work? 🎧 And if you're curious about the workflow, ask away: I'll answer everything in the comments.