Videos made with Claude Opus 5.5: the lists, how they were made, and what fits us
Research for Jason, through the MERIDIAN lead (meridian-lead e5). Started 11:21 AM EDT, Friday 2026-10-16, by the machine clock. Folder: data/research/claude-video-2026-10-16/ (working notes in notes.md, raw pulls in sources/).
- The list going around is yihui-dev/awesome-opus5-5-videos. It was made by Yihui (熠辉), an independent developer, on 2026-09-27, five days after Opus 5.5 came out. It now has 5,429 stars and 703 prompts. At least four rival lists appeared in the same week.
- Claude writes no video pixels itself. In almost every case Claude writes animation code (HTML canvas, SVG, three.js, p5.js, or Python), a headless Chrome paints each frame, and ffmpeg joins the frames into an MP4. Music comes from code, a text-to-speech voice, or Suno. The bigger pieces add image or video models for some shots.
- The pieces are real and anyone can reproduce them. Prompts and full source code are public, and one Reddit user re-ran a viral prompt on their own product and got a similar result for about $4. But the most-viewed "Opus 5.5" posts on X often used Midjourney, Seedance or Higgsfield as well, so a view count is not proof that the code method alone did it.
- For us: animations and explainers can start today with what system76 already has (Node 22, Chrome, ffmpeg with the NVIDIA encoder). For product videos, pair this code method with the Google Flow bridge. Anthropic's own feature, Claude Motion, is beta on Team and Enterprise only, so it isn't on Jason's Max plan.
Every claim carries a label. verified_fact means I saw it myself today in a GitHub API response, a repo, YouTube metadata or a Reddit or Hacker News record. creator's claim means the maker said it. user report means someone else said it, such as a commenter, a list maintainer or a news site. View counts on X come from list maintainers' snapshots, so they are user reports.
1. The source: who made the list, and when
Timeline
| When (EDT) | What | Label |
|---|---|---|
| Tue 2026-09-22 | Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5.5. The r/ClaudeAI announcement post has 2,632 upvotes. | verified_fact |
| 2026-09-22, from about 12:34 PM | The first X posts of Opus 5.5 videos appear within hours, including a three.js pelican from @addyosmani and a video demo from @devteamdrew (1.8M views). | user report (zhuyansen data) |
| 2026-09-22, 2:55 PM | @claudeai posts a thread of community "early explorations", mostly code-drawn animations. It has 1.38M views. | user report (grok) |
| 2026-09-22, 4:24 PM | "Opus 5.5 creates a train journey drawn entirely in JavaScript" is posted to r/ClaudeAI (2,562 upvotes). It is the first big Reddit hit. | verified_fact |
| 2026-09-22 | "Claude Pop: I'm Upping My P(doom)" goes up on YouTube (OtherReality / John Heibel). It has 197,809 views today. | verified_fact |
| 2026-09-24 | "Opus 5.5 is good at explainer videos" reaches Hacker News with 433 points and 223 comments. | verified_fact |
| 2026-09-25 | @stephanlivera posts a 15-second showreel from a one-line prompt. The list calls it "the original viral prompt", with 2.27M views. | user report |
| 2026-09-25 to 09-28 | The first lists appear: athemeroy (09-25), opusvideo (09-25), chuspeeism (09-26), yihui-dev (09-27, 2:19 AM), zhuyansen (09-27), xianyu110 (09-28) and about ten smaller ones. | verified_fact (repo created dates) |
| Sun 2026-09-27, 4:16 AM | Yihui announces the list on X with a 13.6-minute montage of 301 remakes ("$3,000" of Opus 5.5). The post has 96,697 views. A 10-repo roundup on 09-30 (63k views) spreads it further. | user report (grok) |
| Thu 2026-10-08 | Anthropic announces Claude Motion, which makes animated explainers from code with no video model. The launch video on the Claude YouTube channel has 1.17M views. | verified_fact |
| 2026-10-13 | yihui-dev removes 150 entries "not made from a plain Opus 5.5 prompt". 703 remain. | verified_fact (commit) |
The lists, compared
| List | Maker | Stars | Created | What's in it | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| yihui-dev/awesome-opus5-5-videos | Yihui (熠辉), independent developer (blog happyaicoding.com, 179 followers) | 5,429 | 2026-09-27 | 703 prompts, all from X posts. 100 are shown in the gallery and 418 have a "live remake". Categories: motion 369, 3D 117, explainer 116, interactive 101. 207 of the prompts are partial. | Every link goes to skillry.dev with tracking tags, so the list doubles as a funnel. It has no view counts. The first commit is co-authored by Claude Opus 5.5. |
| zhuyansen/awesome-opus-5.5-video | JasonZhu.AI (@GoSailGlobal) | 194 | 2026-09-27 | 1,697 works, each with at least 5,000 views on X, with view snapshots, length and the tools the creator reported. It covers Opus, Sonnet, Haiku and "Fable 5.5 (preview)". This is the most useful data file. | It links to jasonzhu.ai. It says itself that "model attribution is as stated by each creator and was not independently reproduced." |
| athemeroy/awesome-claude-5-5-videos | athemeroy | 539 | 2026-09-25 | 424 source posts. Nine frames are sampled from 199 of them, and the list adds a style and colour study. | It says itself that frame sampling "cannot verify full motion or model calls." |
| zhuyansen/awesome-claude-video-skills | JasonZhu.AI | 669 | 2026-09-27 | About 300 open-source video skills and tools for coding agents. On 2026-10-11 it ran 16 of them on the same 15-second brief. | It links to agentskillshub.top. Its own decision model decides which repos get in. |
| Web roundups | claudevideo.org (1,276 videos), revid.ai (64), fliki.ai (83), opus5video.com (36, sells video work), OfficeChai ("10 best") | n/a | late Sep | SEO pages built on the same X posts | Most belong to video-tool vendors. |
2. How the videos are made
Opus 5.5 does not output video. Nearly every viral piece follows the same five steps. verified_fact I read this in the PDoomVideo, riso-windowseat and Papermorph READMEs, and in the "End of the Show" YouTube description.
Because each frame is a function of time, the output is deterministic and editable: change a word or a timing and render again. That is the real advantage over video models like Veo or Kling. It also explains the weakness: there is no real footage and no photoreal people, and everything looks drawn.
The five routes we found
| Route | What Claude writes | Best for | Key tools |
|---|---|---|---|
| A. Plain web code, no framework. This is the most common route. | One HTML file using canvas, SVG, three.js, p5.js, GSAP or shaders, plus a small render script | Motion graphics, showreels, cartoons, explainers, music videos | Chrome or Playwright, ffmpeg. No skill is needed. |
| B. Video frameworks | React components (Remotion) or HTML compositions (HyperFrames) | Repeatable templates, captions, data-driven series, product promos | Remotion and its official skills, the HyperFrames plugin |
| C. Python drawing | numpy, cairo or scipy scripts, or Manim for maths | Explainers, maths, odd styles | ffmpeg, Piper or Kokoro TTS |
| D. 3D through Blender | Blender Python, run headless or through Blender MCP | 3D scenes, product turntables, environments | Blender (Cycles), mcp-for-blender |
| E. Claude as director | Prompts and shot lists, plus calls to image, video and voice models, then the edit | Anything that needs realistic footage | Seedance, Higgsfield, Runway, Nano Banana, ElevenLabs, Suno. Our Google Flow bridge fits here. |
Which tools show up most
Two counts are below, and they measure different things. The first is the tech tags on yihui's 703 prompts, which cover only plain-prompt pieces. The second is the tools that creators named on zhuyansen's 1,697 X posts. Only 866 of those posts name any tool. user report (list data, counted by me)
Tools creators named (zhuyansen, 866 posts with a tool)
Remotion and HyperFrames get the most stars, but most viral pieces used neither. Plain HTML or canvas plus a render script was the norm. One r/ClaudeAI creator said they thought "claude is using remotion for every motion graphics video" creator's claim, but the data does not support that.
The main repos (stars pulled from the GitHub API today)
| Repo | What it is | Stars | Last push | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| heygen-com/hyperframes | HeyGen's "write HTML, render video" framework for agents, with a Claude Code plugin. Needs Node 22+ and ffmpeg. | 65,072 | 2026-10-16 | Apache-2.0 |
| remotion-dev/remotion | React to video. The long-standing standard. | 64,540 | 2026-10-16 | Free for individuals and for companies with up to 3 employees. Bigger companies pay. |
| remotion-dev/skills | Remotion's official agent skills | 5,235 | 2026-10-16 | none stated |
| calesthio/OpenMontage | An "agentic video production system" with 12 pipelines | 68,833 | 2026-10-16 | AGPL-3.0 |
| ahujasid/mcp-for-blender | Lets an AI drive Blender. It runs any Python unless safe mode is on. | 31,113 | 2026-10-06 | MIT |
| Vincentwei1021/video-shotcraft | Cinematic product videos in Remotion, with 152 shot recipes | 12,166 | 2026-10-16 | Apache-2.0 |
| 3b1b/manim / ManimCommunity/manim | Maths animation in Python | 95,162 / 41,589 | Sep / Oct 2026 | MIT |
| motion-canvas / revideo | TypeScript animation. Rarely seen in this wave. | 19,355 / 4,115 | Jul 2026 | MIT |
| lemomo-ai/lemo-opuscar | Short films with no video model: 51 film styles, each with a demo | 2,632 | 2026-10-16 | MIT |
| digitalsamba/claude-code-video-toolkit | A general video toolkit for Claude Code | 2,253 | 2026-10-12 | MIT |
| kajisho5/ffmpeg-skill | 42 ffmpeg tools for agents, for editing real footage | 1,974 | 2026-10-16 | MIT |
| JohnHeibel/ClaudeAnimationBase | Starter kit for hand-painted cartoons: p5.js and p5.brush, a recurring character, 31 acted emotions | 1,202 | 2026-09-24 | MIT |
| vincentsch/explainroo | Explainers and product demos with a local Kokoro voice. It was the fastest in the 16-skill test. | 571 | 2026-10-15 | MIT |
3. The best examples (15)
I chose these to cover each route and each of Jason's three kinds of content. Each was posted by its maker and comes with a method; I avoided posts that were only screenshots. Times and costs are the makers' own words.
1. LGTM (Looks Good to Me), a music video
Reach: 1,100,250 YouTube views and 29,989 likes verified_fact. It reached 66 points on Hacker News.
How: The song was made with Suno v6. The animation is "Claude Opus 5.5, in TypeScript and three.js". creator's claim
2. Claude Pop: I'm Upping My P(doom)
Reach: 197,809 views verified_fact. The source repo has 2,148 stars and a follow-up starter kit has 1,202 verified_fact.
How: p5.js and p5.brush paint each frame in headless Chrome, and ffmpeg adds the song. Opus wrote its own storyboard and a guide for parallel subagents, one chapter each. It took two generations. The song is an existing 2024 track. creator's claim, and the full code is public.
3. The 15-second "motion designer showreel"
Reach: 2.27M views user report. Called "the original viral prompt", it was copied hundreds of times.
How: A one-line prompt to Opus 5.5 at Max effort: "make a dynamic 15-second motion graphics video that shows what an incredible motion designer you are…". It took about 50 minutes user report, according to an r/MotionDesign repost.
4. A 3-minute history of AI (Remotion explainer)
Reach: 202,974 views in the zhuyansen snapshot (2026-10-12) and 204,549 by grok's count today user report. The two counts agree.
How: Claude Code wrote about 7,400 lines of React/TypeScript in Remotion, drew images in SVG and canvas, used an open-source TTS voice, and made the score in Python. No stock footage and no image or video models. It took about 1 hour and 7% of a weekly limit. creator's claim, as relayed by grok.
5. Window Seat, a risograph train film
Reach: 2,562 upvotes, the first big Reddit hit verified_fact.
How: A single HTML file, with the score played on open-source Salamander piano samples. It was single-shot in about 45 minutes, and a bonus film took about 30. The repo includes the Claude Code skills and docs. creator's claim
6. "What is the purpose of life?", a collage explainer
Reach: 2,241 upvotes verified_fact.
How: A pure JavaScript animation from a single prompt that took 1 hour 20 minutes. It used about 10% of a 5-hour Max 5x window, plus $3.21 of OpenRouter, mostly Nano Banana 2 images and TTS. creator's claim
Reproduced: u/Dio-V ran the same prompt on their own product (Friendr.nl). Unattended, it took about 1.5 to 2 hours and about $4. Claude wrote the script, generated the art, voice and music, synced to the words, and reviewed its own drafts. user report (1,347 upvotes)
7. Grok Bot 30-second motion spot
Reach: 280 upvotes verified_fact. It is useful because the creator shared every number.
How: A one-line brief, clean Claude Code, no skills. Each frame is "a pure function of time" rendered in headless Chrome, and the music and sound effects are made in Python. The only assets are two fonts. Output is 1920×1080 at 60 fps, about 0.3 s per frame on an RTX 4070 laptop, so roughly 10 minutes to render. It took two rounds of notes, 264 steps and about 139M tokens read. creator's claim
8. Quests "Apple-style" launch film (product video)
Reach: 353 upvotes verified_fact.
How: Not a one-shot. It took 3 days and "all of my claude session limits", working scene by scene. The tools were Python, ffmpeg, the Remotion plugin and Higgsfield for some images. Claude built a custom clip-review tool and took screenshots of the real app for staged scenes. creator's claim
9. Lectogram launch video (product video)
How: Made from the product's own codebase plus feedback in Claude Code, over 2 to 3 days of iteration. Panels of subagent reviewers at different model sizes gave notes. creator's claim
10. Powers of Ten: universe to Planck length
Reach: 556 upvotes verified_fact.
How: A lead session wrote the engine and a brief, then ran 8 subagents in parallel, each checking its own screenshots. The result is about 7,100 lines of GLSL and 3,400 of JavaScript in one HTML file, built in 1 hour 50 minutes. It is published as a Claude artifact. creator's claim
11. Sydney vs Claude, a SNES-style fight
Reach: 1,019 upvotes on r/singularity. YouTube has 5,597 views verified_fact.
How: All code, including the music, with no assets given; it "spawned tons of agents". A follow-up 2D-to-3D film ran about 8 hours with 10+ agents and used about 23% of a Max 20x plan. creator's claim
12. "The End of the Show", a Remotion music video
Reach: 242,972 views verified_fact.
How: One long Claude Code session over a few days, with JavaScript rendering in Remotion and a song from Suno after 10 to 12 tries. There was no image or video generation; a few Creative Commons assets were used. When the project grew, the main session became an orchestrator over per-scene agents. creator's claim
13. A creepy day at the office, in Python only
Reach: 394 upvotes verified_fact.
How: One prompt, with no web code: a numpy raycast corridor, cairo drawing, numpy and scipy audio, Piper TTS voices and ffmpeg. It took 45 minutes at extra-high effort and used 4% of a week on the $20 plan. creator's claim
14. Neo's apartment from The Matrix (Blender MCP)
Reach: 154 upvotes verified_fact.
How: Claude drove Blender through MCP, with Opus 5.5 plus Sonnet and Haiku subagents doing the modelling, UVs, camera, materials and compositing. It took about 5 days part-time, guided by drawn notes on screenshots. "A simple prompt isn't enough." creator's claim
15. AI documentary on superintelligence (Claude as director)
Reach: 910k views user report.
How: Opus 5.5 directed the video models Runway, Seedance 2.5, Nano Banana Pro and Lyria. This route is the closest to our Flow bridge. user report, from the list's tools field.
- The core method is real and reproducible. The full source of several viral pieces is public (PDoomVideo, riso-windowseat, Papermorph), and a stranger reproduced the "purpose of life" prompt on their own product. verified_fact for the repos, user report for the reproduction.
- The view counts mix methods. The #1 "Opus 5.5" post by views (about 20.0M, @anabology) reports Midjourney. #2 (7.6M, @EHuanglu) reports Filmera. The 4.0M "Claude Pop" remake used Seedance 2.5 and ElevenLabs. user report The yihui list removed 150 such entries on 2026-10-13 for that reason.
- One-shots exist, but the good ones are not one-shots. The polished product films took 2 to 5 days and whole plan limits (examples 8, 9 and 14).
- Craft people push back. The top comment on r/MotionDesign says there is "no control whatsoever and no ability to make changes, as you would to address client comments". On Hacker News, critics call the AI music videos "grey goo". The counterpoint is that code is fully editable, and Anthropic's Claude Motion pitches exactly that. user report
- Model names are loose. One viral "Opus" piece was corrected by its own poster to "Fable 5.5". The lists give the creator's word only. user report
X (Twitter) check
I ran a search of X through the grok CLI, from an empty folder, finishing at 11:30 AM EDT. Grok read the posts; I did not open X myself. So everything in this section is user report, and counts are as X showed them to grok today. Full notes are in sources/grok_x_search.txt.
- How the list launched. Yihui (@yihui_indie) posted a 13.6-minute montage of 301 remade effects on 2026-09-27 at 4:16 AM EDT, saying they had spent $3,000 having Opus 5.5 redo the most viral effects. The repo link was in the reply. The post has 96,697 views. It is the earliest post naming the list that grok found. post
- How it spread. A roundup of 10 repos by @socialwithaayan on 2026-09-30 (63,483 views, 1,260 bookmarks) named the list next to PDoomVideo, lemo-opuscar, ClaudeAnimationBase and shipvideo. @servasyy_ai counted the showreel prompt copied word for word in 43 of the list's first 282 entries. This is most likely the "report going around" that Jason heard about.
- Anthropic pushed the trend from day one. On launch day (2026-09-22, 2:55 PM EDT) @claudeai posted a thread of "early explorations" that were community videos, with 1.38M views. On 2026-10-02 it posted a favourites thread (793k views). Neither thread names a tool. Claude Motion followed on 2026-10-08, with 11.26M views on the root post. No first-person post about the videos by a named Anthropic staff member turned up. A claim that Alex Albert has a piece in the list is second-hand and unconfirmed.
- Top X posts with a stated method (grok's count of views):
- @shfred0: Opus animates its own life, all JavaScript brush strokes. 376k views.
- @chetaslua: "The life of a Human", two prompts, 2 hours, 27M tokens at Max effort. 291k views.
- @kimmonismus: a 3-minute history of AI in about 7,400 lines of Remotion, an open-source TTS voice and a Python score, in about 1 hour and 7% of a weekly limit. 205k views.
- @Voxyz_ai: "small print", rendered with HyperFrames in one index.html with music made in Python. 127k views. The same author's four-agent HyperFrames prompt (breakdown, storyboard, build, review) got 1,442 bookmarks.
- @shneural: Opus wrote its own Python engine, rendered a Blender shot and made the music, 900 frames in 1 hour 32 minutes. $81 at API prices.
- @jurlycat: a 78-second film in one index.html with no libraries (Canvas 2D and Web Audio), in about 45 minutes.
4. What fits us
What we already have (checked read-only today on system76)
- Node 22.16.0, Google Chrome, Playwright's Chromium and ffmpeg with the NVIDIA encoder (NVENC) on an RTX 4070 SUPER 12 GB. verified_fact That is everything route A needs, so no install is required.
- Blender 3.0.1, a 2021 build. It works for headless Python renders (
blender -b -P script.py), but it is old for Blender MCP and current scripts. verified_fact - A
remotion-videoskill is already in the repo at.claude/skills/remotion-video/(written in Chinese). Remotion itself is not installed. verified_fact - The cartoon pipeline plan (
data/cartoon/UPGRADE-STACK.md) covers local diffusion and image-to-video. The code method here is the cheap, IP-safe complement to it. - The Google Flow bridge (
data/research/google-flow/FLOW-PLAYBOOK.md) gives real-looking footage: Omni 1.1 Flash costs 4 credits for a 4-second clip at 360p, and images cost 0. - Kokoro TTS is already in use on the P52 for voice alerts, and Kokoro is the same local voice explainroo uses.
By kind of content
| Jason's content | Best method for us | Why | What it would take |
|---|---|---|---|
| Animations (cartoons, characters, music-video style) | Route A: Claude writes p5.js, canvas or three.js, headless Chrome renders it, ffmpeg encodes it. For a recurring hand-drawn character, borrow the ClaudeAnimationBase pattern (style guide, character sheet, one subagent per scene). | $0, works today, fully editable, and there is no IP filter, unlike Flow, which refused a client character this morning. | Nothing to install. One brief with a scene list, a style guide and a quota cap per run. |
| Product videos | A hybrid. Flow makes the real product shots (still then animate, 4 credits per clip). Code makes the titles, price cards, feature callouts and the final edit. ffmpeg joins them. | The code method cannot show the real item in the box, and Flow cannot keep exact text, prices or brand type. Each covers the other's gap. Examples 8 and 9 show code-only launch films are possible but took days. | Route A works today. A framework would help for a repeatable template; see the installs below. |
| General content (explainers, data, social clips) | Route A or C for explainers. Add Kokoro for narration, Manim for any maths, and the ffmpeg-skill approach for cutting real footage. | This is where the method is strongest: Claude Motion, Papermorph and explainroo all aim at it. | Nothing for a first test. explainroo or Manim if we like the result. |
GPU and quota notes
- Painting frames is mostly CPU and Chrome work. The GPUs help with ffmpeg encoding, Blender Cycles and local TTS. Long renders can be split by frame range across machines. PDoomVideo's renderer already takes
--frames=a:b --workers=Nverified_fact, so the RTX 3080 boxes (mg1 and mg2) could render frame ranges in parallel. - Quota is the real cost. The makers report 4% of a week ($20 plan), about 10% of a 5-hour window (Max 5x), 23% of a Max 20x plan for an 8-hour run, and "all of my session limits" over 3 days. creator's claim Any brief should set a time cap and an effort level.
Things we could install (recommendation only; nothing was installed)
| Order | What | Why | Cost, licence and caution |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Nothing. Run a plain Claude Code test first. | The head-to-head test found that no skill passed in 4.4 minutes. Make one 15-second piece of each kind first. | $0, quota only |
| 1 | HyperFrames plugin (claude plugin install hyperframes@hyperframes) | HTML-native, so it suits how Claude already writes these. It has templates and a media skill. Needs Node 22+ and ffmpeg, which we have. | Apache-2.0, free. It was the slowest in the test (23.5 minutes). |
| 2 | Remotion skills plus Remotion | Best for repeatable product-video templates and captions. We already have a skill stub. | Free for individuals and companies with up to 3 employees. Check which entity owns the client work first. |
| 3 | explainroo | The fastest explainer in the test, with a local Kokoro voice and word-timed captions. | MIT. Small repo (571 stars), so read it before use. |
| 4 | A newer Blender (4.x or 5.x tarball) and mcp-for-blender | 3D product turntables and scenes (examples 14 and 15) | MIT. It runs any Python inside Blender by default, so set BLENDER_MCP_SAFE_MODE=1. |
| 5 | Manim (Community) | Only if maths or diagram explainers become a series | MIT |
Not for us now: Claude Motion (Team and Enterprise only), OpenMontage (AGPL and large), and Suno (not in our stack; music videos depend on it).
Suggested first step
/tmp. Then show Jason the three MP4s next to a Flow clip of the same product. That shows which method suits which content before anything is installed.