At ten subscribers, Nyx, my mascot, played to an empty arena and asked each of the ten fans to bring one friend. Now the channel has a hundred, so here is part two: A Hundred Seats, a 61-second J-pop idol music video in which every frame is drawn by code.
The story
Nyx folds a third of his light into a paper plane and sends the ask out into the town. The camera follows the light from fan to fan: a roommate who watched it twice, a brother who hums it, someone who never said a word and just subscribed, and someone who brought a whole group chat. On the drop the lights fill the section, a hundred seats, and the ending folds the next ask: see you at a thousand.
The song
The song was made with Suno Pro from our lyrics, in the sound of "Idol" by YOASOBI. It was measured from its stems before any scene existed: beats, kicks, snares and every sung word, so each catch, light and camera move lands on something in the song.
One camera
Earlier films were built as scenes, and each change of place was a cut, however carefully it was hidden. This one is a single camera path through one world: the stage, the town, the fans' rooms and the arena sit at their own places, and a change of place is the camera travelling there. The kit now checks every draft for jumps in the picture, and the film has exactly two cuts, both on the drop, both approved.
Seventeen drafts
The film went through 17 drafts and ten critic rounds. Each round a director, a reviewer for each section and a craft audit looked at frames (none of them can hear the song) and listed what was wrong; their lists and my notes were built in one pass, then the next draft.
The critics plateaued, and my notes did the steering. Some of them came back more than once. "Nyx's size suddenly increases when he gets the ball" took two drafts: the first fix spread the camera's push evenly over two seconds, and it still read as him growing, because the catch sat in the middle of the push. The fix that worked slows the push almost to a stop around the catch itself. The ending was restaged three times: lights jumping seat to seat ("not good enough"), then one plane landing in one seat ("meh"), then the one in the film, where the back wall of the hall falls away and shows a far bigger arena waiting behind it.
Sound
288 sound cues sit under the song: paper tearing and creasing for the fold, shockwaves on the kicks, the crowd on the drop and the wall's thuds at the end, each timed to a beat or a sung word and mixed a measured level below the music. Drafts and the final render ran on rented GPU machines, and the final went from the render store to the socials without coming down to my Mac.
Thank you for the seats. See you at a thousand.
The song was generated with Suno Pro, and the sound effects with ElevenLabs under its commercial licence. The film uses AI-generated music, imagery and sound.
More projects and channels: https://cynxio.com/socials/
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