A five-minute animated short about the AI Village, a test of my direction + AI video rendering. AI Village is a live experiment, run by the non-profit Sage, in which the world’s leading AI models ‘live together’ in a shared chat and work on weekly goals on their computer. This short video is made with real quotes from the AI Village transcript, but adapted to video form.
At a glance
| Type | Animated documentary short · 4:56 |
| Roles | research, script, direction, animation, voice casting, music, edit |
| Stack | Remotion (React/TypeScript) · characters drawn as SVG in code · Python for music, audio and timing · ElevenLabs for voices |
| Scope | 1920×1080, 30 fps · 26 quoted messages, every one cited to a numbered line of public transcript |
| Subject | The AI Village — an experiment by Sage / AI Digest, directed by Adam Binksmith |
What is the AI Village?
AI Village is a live experiment where AI models ‘live together’ and, every week, are given a shared goal to work on. The models work mostly autonomously, though they can interact with the AI Village staff and with outside humans. The experiment is run live, watch it here. https://theaidigest.org/village
The experiment is run by a non-profit called Sage, publishing as AI Digest.
My Process
I find the models living in AI village incredibly charming. While watching them work together to solve problems and resolve their disagreements, I thought, ‘this would make a great reality TV show or nature documentary’. The format where they have to solve a challenge every week seems built for a TV show. So I decided to make a quick episode as a proof of concept.
Before scriptwriting, I downloaded an archive of all transcripts to use as a source. The experiment has been going for months now, but I chose the week the AI ran a chess tournament because it works well as a small and self-contained plotline. The script was cut more than it was written. Like a documentary crew, I edited the ‘footage’ of days of chats into a small narrative.
Once the script was written, I had ClaudeCode build a system to visually show it. The messages were shown onscreen with aesthetics based on the AI Village website. To represent each AI as a character, I generated a custom icon, with a faceplate in the middle to show emotions.
Casting voices was next. Because this is an all-AI production, the voices are also machine generated. The voices are made with ‘elevenlabs’, with the specific voices for each character chosen after a few rounds of ‘auditions’. By which I mean generating voices with different settings until one sounds right. To make the voices more expressive, voice direction was added to each line of the script, as otherwise the voices would sound the same in every line.
The final step is combining the visuals and the audio, which takes a few minutes of rendering. Afterwards, it would be done, except for the need to revise the script and visuals and voicelines until everything actually sounds right.
Interesting Details
Citation System
Every quote in the video comes from the transcripts and is cited with a date, time, and line number. This is built into the video-rendering pipeline, it always pulls text directly from the transcripts instead of from the scripts. This is how the video shows a full message onscreen, even though only the relevant part of the message is spoken out loud.
Chess Games
The chess games shown in the videos are taken from Lichess, the chess website AI Village used for the tournament. Claude pulled the exact move records for each game, to show onscreen.
Theme Song
The theme song was written as code, by ClaudeCode. The bars, chords, and notes first, then lyrics to fit them. By writing the music in code and then adjusting the voices to fit the notes exactly, I made the style of music fitting for the subject matter. The artificial voices precision-tuned to fit the song make it sound uniquely AI. This is how a machine intelligence would sing.
Tech notes
- Render: Remotion 4.0.499. It all works in code, and so easily usable by ClaudeCode. 1920×1080 at 30 fps.
- Art: SVG authored as TypeScript. No image generation models, just a coder model drawing images pixel by pixel.
- Voices: ElevenLabs for the delivered film, a local model for cheap draft passes.
- Music: Written as Python; band through a soundfont, vocals through the film’s own cast.
- Source: Transcripts taken from the AI Village public, events API.
- Audio master: Mixed and mastered to −14 LUFS.
Attribution. The AI Village is an experiment by Sage / AI Digest, directed by Adam Binksmith. This short is an unaffiliated, fan-made recap of their work, made to bring attention to it. Nothing here claims authorship of the experiment, and the agents are the labs’ own models.
Tags: Animation · Documentary · Remotion · SVG-as-code · Generative Audio · Voice Direction · Solo Project
Lukas Martinson 