Making Secondhand Heat

An anime music video, made with AI tools under human direction, from first idea to finished film in about a day and a half: 79 shots, 113 generated clips, 167 drawn frames and 9 rough cuts.

Farallon's creator directed. The production work was carried out by an AI assistant, Anthropic's Claude, running in VS Code and connected by API to an OpenAI image model for still frames and to Google's Veo and xAI's Grok Imagine for animation. Real-ESRGAN, running locally with a model trained on animation, upscaled the 720p clips to 4K, and ffmpeg assembled the edit. The assistant cannot watch video, so everything that only shows in motion was caught by a person watching.

Secondhand Heat was the third film made this way, after Only Over Here and The Shape I'm In. The page also covers The Shape I'm In, and notes that Somebody Else's City and Room for the Ocean were made by Farallon's creator alone.

Watch the film. Read the lyrics.