Animating brain rot: a crew of brain cells that switch off one by one

One More is a music video about doomscrolling. At 11:58 pm someone picks up their phone to do one thing. Inside their head a crew of brain cells is at work, and one of them, the cell that keeps the list, spends the song trying to remember what the thing was.

The film was written and animated in TypeScript with Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code, with direction and many rounds of notes from Derwin Oesmanto at Cynxio. The song was generated with Suno from our lyrics. The pictures were generated with an AI image model as separate layers; the motion, light, timing and lettering are code. No video generator was used.

A stake for every verse

The song was written before any picture: a lead who can lose something, and a verse that costs it something each time. Verse one costs the brain its memory, verse two its attention, verse three its language. The last chorus knows what the thing was (call Mum back) and scrolls anyway.

The lights are workers

The first full draft drew brain cells as amber points of light along the folds of a brain. Nobody watching could tell they were cells. The fix came from the director's notes: make every cell a small worker in the shape of our mascot, Nyx, each in its own muted colour, busy at a desk like an office. Far off, their desk lamps are the amber lights; the camera's first push goes from one light to the worker under it.

When a department goes, its workers stop one by one: each turns to the screen, its colour drains to grey, its lamp clicks off. Nyx, the only cyan one, is the last light in the building.

Everything in layers

No generated picture is used as a whole frame. The office is a floor, rows of desks, workers in several poses, backdrops of cabinets and pinboards at their own depths; the phone's feed is a background, a subject in two or three poses and the app's buttons as separate pieces. That is what lets the camera move through a place instead of panning across a poster.

Every frame is a function of song time

Each scene is a pure function of the song's clock, timed from measured word starts and beats. Any moment can be rendered alone, which is what made the review loop possible: fresh reviewers looked at frames of each draft, a register gave every finding a permanent ID, builders fixed them scene by scene, and a separate checker marked each one from stills before the next render.

The brain-cell counter is one example of the detail that came out of those rounds: a split-flap board whose tiles flip as 86,000,000,000 falls to 1.

Credits

Direction, story and edit notes: Derwin Oesmanto (Cynxio). Animation, staging and code: Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic), in Claude Code. Song: "One More", generated with Suno. Pictures: an AI image model. Sound effects: ElevenLabs. Engine: our film kit, forked from pdoom-video by Giacomo Magnanini (MIT licence). Font: Plus Jakarta Sans (SIL Open Font License).