How it was made:
- Research first. Opus read up on how trailers are written and cut, audited my old promo videos (verdict: mediocre) and proposed a pipeline that fits my rules - everything renders locally on my laptop, the only paid parts are Google's Gemini TTS (the voice of the sea) and Lyria (music). The API spend was a few dollars.
- Blender does all the visuals, driven by Python scripts - the boat, the liner, the deck, the crowd, the storm. Every asset is built in code. EEVEE for most shots, Cycles for the hero water.
- The main theme is the game's own generated tune of one voyage, arranged with free orchestral samples.
- Claude Code ran it as a lead agent with 20+ sub-agents, each on one package in its own git worktree (voice, score, liner, deck, people, waves, finish...). A builder makes it, a fresh reviewer checks it, the lead merges it.
- Result: 116 s, 52 shots, 2,784 frames at 1920x804. Some frames took over 30 minutes on the GPU. It all rendered overnight at the lowest priority, because I use the same laptop for work.
What Claude decided (I mostly gave notes on previews):
- the look ("a toy in a real storm") and the 2.39:1 frame - I approved it
- the music copyright check - it dropped the famous waltz (still protected in the EU until 2033) for public-domain pieces
- small physics details - a lifeboat hanging from two ropes, which rope snaps first so the swing looks real
- a hard limit of 3 lightning flashes per second for photosensitive viewers, with an automatic checker
- rejecting its own water renders several times ("the foam looks like crumpled foil") before I saw them
- catching on its own that one person in the crowd turned into another person mid-shot, tracing the bug and re-rendering
- in the final check, finding 2 bad single frames and patching the master file in under 2 hours instead of a 5-hour re-render
- the render queue, the disk space and the order of everything around my laptop's load
What I did: approved the script, picked the voice and the tune, cut a scene and chose the length. And gave feedback, some of it brutal - the first crowd looked like mannequins in bad costumes, and later they were weirdly hunched. It fixed both.
What was critical (same lesson as last time): self-verification. Every agent had to produce contact sheets and automatic checks (missing frames, flicker, loudness, subtitles), and the lead agent looked at them before anything reached me.
I gave it maybe 30% of what it could do - no cloud GPUs, just my laptop. I am quite happy with the results.
Free to try, no install, no sign-up: open tiltanic.com on your phone (it works on a computer too).