The Illusion of Agency

The event

The $CLAUDIA video contest, run by anabology, asked for the best music video starring Claudia, an open character. It had a hard deadline: 6 November 2026, 10 pm EST. We had days, and a budget of zero for video generation.

The film

Keys to My Heart. "Keys" means the keys to a heart and the keyframes that make motion possible. It runs 3:16 at 122.5 beats per minute.

Claudia starts frozen, like a gallery photograph. A first blink leads to a pencil test. Then ink, painted cel, graphic shapes, expressive painted frames and three-dimensional light teach her how to move. Each verse names a principle while its effect appears on screen, and a tally travels from 0 to 12 across seven visual eras.

At 11 of 12 she stops, and looks back at the still image she used to be. The twelfth principle, Appeal, belongs to the final chorus: not just a beautiful drawing, but a character worth caring about.

Watch the full film on YouTube

Who made it

Human direction, agent-assisted animation. A person made the idea, the words and every approval. Claude wrote the beat map, storyboards and every animation in code. Other agents made the character sheets, frames and reviews, Google Flow made the moving clips and Suno made the song. The whole story, with its failures and credits, is on the project page.

Why it is here

It is the trailer for The Illusion of Agency: the twelve principles of animation taught to people and to agents, where every principle becomes a test an agent can pass or fail. Keys by humans. In-betweens by agents.

Claudia is an open character by anabology (claudia.gallery). Made with AI tools, as credited above.