From an Opus 5.5 Video to Animation Workflows and a Continuous Pilot
By toewpqAbout 10 min readWatching I'm Upping My P(doom), made with Claude Opus 5.5, started this experiment: could a coding agent organize images, motion, speech and editing into a complete video?
This round produced two films. Rainy Delivery runs for 150 seconds and reuses illustrations and 2D character motion. The Garbage Truck Is Here! runs for 160 seconds and generates characters, objects and environments together. Their different production choices led to three workflows.
Starting with the Opus 5.5 reference
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The creator published PDoomVideo. The project describes Opus 5.5 writing the storyboard and animation code, with p5.js, p5.brush, headless Chrome and FFmpeg rendering the pictures, and an existing song providing the music.
I followed that interest in tool coordination with an ImageGen-based visual pipeline: generate assets, review action and space, then assemble selected pictures, sound and captions.
Workflow one: GIFs and a motion library
The motion library stores character IDs, poses, timing and previews. This sword swing uses eight generated poses. Its ending returns to the start with a visible loop reset.
Sword-swing GIF assembled from eight generated poses
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Reuse is the point. A reviewed standing pose, head turn or wave can be referenced again instead of restarting from a character sheet. Shared slots for an original character's references, expressions, outfits and action index are ready for the next design.
Workflow two: limited animation and low-cost static video
Rainy Delivery: reused assets and 2D character motion.
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Rainy Delivery passed film acceptance. It follows a message after work, a walk toward the bus stop and the return home with medicine. Office, street, waiting, bus-interior and home shots use complete illustrations, holds and gentle camera motion. The bypass from 74–84 seconds uses a 2D rig to move character texture over one background.
Reviewing the whole film makes its strengths and style clear. The setting stays stable and a small set of pictures supports the full story. Character movement is continuously calculated, while narration and captions connect shots. Long office and waiting shots feel like illustrated storytelling, and the bypass has a visible cutout quality. The limited-animation objective is complete; the next step is stronger interaction with the setting.
Reusing assets shot by shot
I use two kinds of shots. Complete illustrations suit receiving news, looking into the distance, resting on the bus and ending the story. A retained background with reviewed transparent poses or character texture suits standing, short steps and simple motion.
A neighborhood can offer a shopfront, sidewalk or waiting area. Reuse applies within suitable shots, rather than fixing the entire film to one background. For pickup, sitting, stairs or foreground occlusion, decide whether the existing assets express the contact; complex events go to the whole-scene workflow.
The production order is:
- Define the beginning, ending, action and prop states, identifying environmental contact early.
- Review the setting's ground, open route, obstacle ends and viewpoint.
- Select assets with the same character, outfit and prop state, retaining soles and complete silhouettes.
- Match scale, light, foot placement and shadows, then time holds, movement, foot changes and settling.
- Fit shots and captions to measured narration and review the full audiovisual edit and state transitions.
Prompts establish low-interaction layouts, for example:
The character stands or takes short steps on flat, open pedestrian ground, with the whole body and soles visible. Walls, vehicles, furniture and rails are outside the route. Do not walk behind them, hold a rail, lean, pick up background objects or cross steps. The existing tote stays in the same hand; start and end positions are at the same ground height.
Reusing backgrounds, character assets and editing reduces repeated whole-scene generation. Cutting, rigging and review remain production work. Choose by shot: repeatedly repairing complex contact in a layered scene can create more rework.
Measuring sliding separately
Stance-foot comparison: retain or remove the placement constraint.
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Two versions use the same texture and route. One plants the stance foot; the other lets the sole move with the character during support. The tool matches sole texture in encoded frames to measure displacement over 0.25 seconds.
| Condition | Visible measurement windows | Median displacement | 95th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fixed foot placement | 27 | 0px | 3px |
| Constraint removed | 18 | 20px | About 21px |
This exposes sliding and supplies a reusable motion-library check. Whether the character actually bypasses a rail or touches an object is assessed from the scene sequence.
Workflow three: interaction with the environment
The Garbage Truck Is Here!: characters, objects and backgrounds generated together.
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This story tests contact and changing states. A newly arrived resident hears the garbage-truck melody and takes her sorted bags downstairs. A neighbor's tote catches on the handrail, spilling bottles and a can. She stops to help, then they dispose of the waste separately and walk home together. The unfamiliar alley feels more familiar.
Each image generates characters, objects, setting, light and contact shadows together. The next step receives the previous full frame, identity and scene references, and a small next-action description. The neighborhood can extend into an entrance, sidewalk and collection point without fixing background pixels.
The useful improvement is visible in pickup and handoff. She puts her own bags down, squats, picks up the recyclables and returns them to the neighbor's tote. At collection, her held-object state changes after the waste and recycling handoffs. Drawing action and objects together suits these events better than moving a character over a fixed base.
The film uses 76 whole-scene poses, 11 Taiwan Mandarin narration clips and 43 captions. Walking still shows pose holds and cuts, but the concrete contact events are more developed than in the earlier workflow. Source images are 836×470 and 1672×941, exported at 1080p; the previous page played a 540p copy; ishare now provides adaptive stream delivery.
Errors that changed the production method
Bypassing becomes climbing a barrier
Early counterexample: a requested bypass turns into rail contact and climbing poses.
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The early instruction asked for a bypass, but the ending reached onto the rail and raised a leg near it, reading as a climb. That is a concrete route and action error. The later low-cost film uses an open route and 2D control; the whole-scene workflow also treats complex person/railing occlusion as a shot-design limit.
Put the obstacle end and walkable gap in the shot, keep hands beside the body, and inspect the actual route over time. Foot placement or forward-facing poses alone can miss the person's relationship to the barrier.
Revised stairs still contain malformed treads
G09R stair revision with inconsistent treads, landing and rail slope
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G09, G10 and G11 in the garbage-truck story had confused stair geography. G09R looked more like the intended apartment after revision, but I spotted abnormal treads in the edit. The entire group was removed and replaced with a lock close-up, then shoes and the second-floor landing.
Selected door-lock close-up
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This changed the shot design. A close-up avoids the complex stair flight, and the flat landing supports the bottle pickup. The narrative continues clearly. Similar spatial problems should lead to another viewpoint or smaller action steps.
Prop counts and hands change unexpectedly
Rejected picture with a can still on the floor and another already at the tote opening
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The pickup once showed a can on the ground and another at the tote opening. The new lock group also switched keys and bag handles between hands. Inventory review removed the duplicated can frames; the lock uses panels 1, 2 and 4, dropping panel 3. Her bags must reach the wall before she squats, rather than vanishing early.
These errors made prompts concrete: grasp before lifting, receive before releasing, and specify every hand and object position. Rejected assets are separate; the final timeline references reviewed frames.
Sound changed with the storytelling
The initial sustained low tone and repeated high chimes made the pictures feel uncanny. The revision removes the drone, uses short truck cues and sparse piano, and lowers background sound during narration.
Third-person off-screen narration lets the story unfold without tying dialogue to character mouths. Captions follow the narrator. After the original Edge speech path returned 403, the project I supplied, wangwangit/tts, produced Taiwan Mandarin through its locally executed Microsoft REST path.
A continuous rainy-night flower-shop pilot
The next story follows this six-panel reference: pass the flower shop, notice the fallen planter, crouch and touch it, set it upright, exchange a greeting with the shopkeeper, then walk on.
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This is a story and composition reference, not extracted film frames. It does not establish that the later actions have been generated. Production still follows observable states: approach, stop, crouch, touch, then lift only after contact is established.
I generated the first continuous clip at gemini.google.com, recording the model name as “Gemini 4.” The underlying video model version was not independently verified, so this is not presented as a confirmed Veo comparison.
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The clip runs for 10 seconds at 1280×720 and 24fps; all 240 frames decode. It retains the flower shop, the woman and one fallen target planter while showing an approach, stop, crouch and reach. That supports a limited feasibility finding: a scene reference can be developed into a coherent continuous action worth pursuing.
The required contact is still missing. She crouches too far from the pottery and reaches toward loose leaves. Both the nine-second evidence frame and the final frame show a gap between her hand and the terracotta rim.
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I am retaining it as a feasibility pilot with a NEEDS_REVIEW decision. There is no observed contact completion point to trim around, and no basis for editing it as a successful lift. The next change is small: continue walking until the exposed rim is within bent-elbow reach, then crouch beside it. Uprighting the planter, greeting the shopkeeper and leaving remain future shots.
Codex checks the locked reference hashes, decodes frames and reviews object inventory, foot support and contact states. Media validation and narrative acceptance stay separate. The actual web attachment and submitted prompt were not captured, so reference binding remains unverified; visual similarity alone cannot prove the input was bound or establish a model-reference failure.
What this round leaves us
The three workflows and the continuous pilot have distinct scopes: the motion library stores reusable character actions; the low-cost workflow organizes illustrated storytelling and simple movement; whole-scene generation handles contact between people, objects and the setting.
Both films provide actual production results. For an original character, I will reuse the reference, expression, outfit and action-index structure across these workflows and continue assessing how motion fits the environment.
Code, prompts and review findings live under video/: actions, limited animation, whole-scene storytelling and the flower-shop pilot. The root media manifest links to external assets.
The Garbage Truck Is Here! — full 1080p film
Rainy Delivery — full 720p film
Images and videos now live on ishare; the repository keeps code, prompts, review findings and a media manifest. Fetch original images on demand and verify their hashes. Stream delivery is transcoded, not the original video download. The MIT speech dependency is included under third_party/tts/, with its upstream commit and license.