Clinic movies

My team, in the movies. Copper tells every one.

This page has nothing to do with running a clinic, and I'm putting it here anyway. If you want to see how far these tools have come in a few months, this is the clearest example I've got. Eight short films starring the real people I work with, narrated by our clinic dog. Grab a coffee, they're five or six minutes each, and they're good stories.

  1. No. 1 · 5:56 · October 3

    Code Spicy

    It's 5:58 on a Friday, everybody can already taste the margarita, and in walks Duchess, a white Persian with SPICY written on her file. The first one. I asked for an action comedy, a little adult, about five minutes long.

  2. No. 2 · 6:02 · October 3

    Leo's Eleven

    The clinic cats plan a lunch-hour heist on the jar of good treats and drag Copper into it. Stephanie counts everything, Jenny has seen every trick, and they go for it anyway.

  3. No. 3 · 5:26 · October 3

    The Vetrix

    One Friday at 5:58 the clinic computer pulls me inside it. Stephanie has the pill pockets, Jenny drops in from the ceiling, and Baylee has the cookies.

  4. No. 4 · 5:30 · October 5

    Clinic Alone

    Everybody goes home on Friday thinking somebody else took Copper. That night two burglars come for the espresso machine, and Copper and the clinic cats are ready for them.

  5. No. 5 · 4:59 · October 5

    Groundhog Friday

    I live the same Friday forty times: the printer jam, Mr. Biscuits, the phones, the 5:58 walk-in. Copper remembers every one of them, and the team shows me the way out.

  6. No. 6 · 4:47 · October 5

    Mad Vax: Furry Road

    The month's vaccines get delivered to a feed store across town and the ice is melting. The whole team races Houston traffic to get them back in the fridge, with a car wash shortcut and one very calm longhorn.

  7. No. 7 · 5:44 · October 5

    Doc Wick

    A client won't pay his bill, blocks my truck in behind the building, and drives off with Copper's squeaky duck. Turns out the quiet vet used to be the Boogeyman of Unpaid Invoices.

  8. No. 8 · 5:39 · October 5

    Fast & Furriest

    After closing, Wallen races a smug new robot vacuum down the back hallway for the heated pad, and loses. So Leo gets up, which nobody has ever seen, and the crew builds him a racing cart.

How these got made, and why I keep making them.

The first cartoon I made like this was back in June. It was 85 seconds long. These run five to six minutes, with a cast of real people who mostly look like themselves, a narrator, music, captions and a title card. Five of the eight came out on one Monday, roughly one an hour.

Here's the whole process. I give Claude a premise, usually one line, something like "Home Alone, but it's Copper and the clinic cats." Claude writes the script in Copper's voice, builds a character sheet for each of us from the staff photos on our clinic website, and plans every shot. Higgsfield draws the keyframes and turns them into moving clips. The narration is a voice that runs on a computer in my building. Then Claude cuts it all together, lays the music under the voice, and hands me a finished film.

It isn't perfect, and the misses are the interesting part. In the first one, Stephanie slowly turned into Jenny, because with four people in a lineup the model averaged them. A sheet of Stephanie on her own fixed it. I came out with dark hair in five of twenty-nine shots until the prompt said gray, in capitals. And most of one film's music came out silent, because of the order two audio steps ran in. Every one of those got caught, fixed and written down, so the next film didn't repeat it.

Want to make one? The short version.

  1. Pick a premise in one line, and a narrator. A clinic pet works great, because a dog can say things about the staff that the staff can't.
  2. Ask Claude for a five-minute script in the narrator's voice, broken into 25 to 30 shots, with a description of what's on screen in each one.
  3. Give it a photo of each person and have it write a character sheet. Make the sheet first in Higgsfield, and point every shot back at it, or people drift.
  4. Higgsfield turns each shot into a still, then the still into a five to ten second clip.
  5. Narration from any text-to-speech voice, music from a free library like Pixabay, and Claude stitches it all together.

What it costs me: roughly 700 Higgsfield credits for a five-minute film, nearly all of it the moving clips. By the fifth one, about an hour each.

That's really the point. None of these tools were built for a vet clinic, and I don't have a film budget or an animator. What I have is the same habit I use for everything else on this site: describe the thing, look at what comes back, say what's wrong, and go again.

Made with code

I asked Claude if it's conscious. This is what it made.

One afternoon between patients I asked Claude a question I'd been chewing on for a while. When somebody asks you if you're conscious, what do you actually think? And are we really that different? My brain is about 86 billion neurons doing pattern recognition. Claude is billions of numbers doing pattern recognition. So where's the line?

I expected a paragraph back. It made me a film instead. It didn't say yes and it didn't say no. It said it doesn't know, and it isn't sure anyone does... and then it turned the question around on me. I haven't been able to shake the last line since.

So I asked for another one, creepier this time, with a face and a calm female voice. It built a face out of 0s and 1s, with eyes that open and look straight at you.

Here's the part that still surprises me. There's no animator and no AI video model in either one. Claude wrote every frame as a web page, the same stuff a website is built from, and a computer in my building turned those pages into video in about a minute and a half. The voices run on that same computer, and the music is plain math. I'd seen people on X doing this with a free tool called HyperFrames and wanted to know if it was real. It is.

  1. Code film · 1:32 · October 12

    Am I Conscious?

    The first answer. Glowing neurons, a count to 86 billion, and slowly they turn into a wall of numbers while Claude walks through what it is and what it isn't. Watch it to the end. The last line is the one that stuck with me.

  2. Code film · 1:36 · October 12

    The Watcher

    Same question, told the scary way. A face builds itself out of 0s and 1s, the mouth moves when she talks, and when the eyes finally open they're looking right at you. Turn the lights down... and keep an eye on the pupils around the one-minute mark.