Using Claude Code in Various VFX and Animation Tests

I am running a series of tests using AI coding applied to various topics in visual effects, animation and astronomy visualization.  These little demonstrations are intended to be nothing more than proofs of concept.  

Posts like this one will be collected and added to a blog devoted specifically to this topic, and related topics of using technology in visual effects, animation and some astronomy visualization.  In the interim these posts will be added to my general blog.  

Here is a list of the tests in progress:

1. Write a program that examines all movies in a folder, determines their resolution, and writes a script to transcode the movies to the highest resolution maintaining original quality, and assemble those clips into a single movie.

2. Write a program that runs on a smartphone to listen to a conversation, determine who is speaking, and notifies the speaker if they are overly dominating a conversation.

3. Write a program that uses the famous Yale Bright Star Catalog (YBSC) and visualizes it in a web browser using Web GL.

4. Write a browser based DAG (directed acyclic graph) designer that might be a front end to any application that could use such a graph.  Traditionally this has been such things as a compositor, a material designer or an animation script.

5. Write a program that analyzes audio and visualizes the themes and instruments in a way that we might a click track for animation from that audio.

6. Write a program that analyzes the famous "find a grave" database, downloads the graves from a designated region and visualizes the result in a web browser.

The results so far have been promising.  In all cases, certain aspects of the test application have been achieved in a few days at most.  In at least one case, the audio cases in particular (e.g. 2 and 5 above), the limitations of my knowledge are exposed.  The process of analyzing continuous speech to determine who is speaking is non-trivial.  Same for the process of deducing themes in music.  Nevertheless, in both cases, I quickly got to the place where I had a good framework for testing ideas and a GUI which, while certainly not final, was useful for prototyping.

As with using an AI image generation program, it is all about a carefully constructed prompt.  

The feeling of using this AI coding is actually very positive.  It is a very productive process.  Whether it will result in final applications is to be determined.

Here are some examples from works in progress.

From the graph construction and visualization test:

From the YBSC visualization. It is very dark so please click to enlarge:

Audio analysis

Game grid 

Diarization app for android

A very simple visualization of cemeteries in Rome, using a few cemeteries limited to 100 people per cemetery as Rome has so many.

The Old Days of Job Recommendations

Sometimes I talk to friends about how to end my first world underemployment.   People wonder what it is I want (other than for someone else to do my marketing for me).  So here I am going to describe what, ideally, I would want, and then it will be clear that I won't get it, because, as you will see, everything has changed.

In the previous century, when the world was new, and we were in the 1970s and the 1980s, I was able to get friends and acquaintances work, or a project, by simply knowing who was looking for work, and who was looking to hire someone and doing a match.  Maybe one or two phone calls.  I was able to get a lot of people work.  People would meet, see if there was a match and only then was salary and human resources involved.  It is hard to say how many people I helped, but maybe a dozen or two.  

But the world has changed since then.  Consider: back then not many people knew this stuff (computer technology, programming, networks, graphics, etc).  Everyone was younger, and relatively new to their career.  So that meant they cost less, and also they would not be a threat to anyone currently working.  They probably had been recently working, or just out of college, or maybe back from a trip to Europe.  We all knew each other, generally speaking.

Plus, and for what it is worth, I was good at this.  I was good at matching needs to people and I had some excellent successes.

But the world has changed since then in all the obvious ways one can deduce from what I wrote above.

So when I can't seem to get work, usually because of choices I made that turned out to be inadvisable, or because of health issues, the less said the better, or for other reasons, I did not fit the profile of what people were looking for.  Of course I did not see it that way, but that is another story.  

I am pining for the old country, perhaps, across the seas, no longer in existence.

It is also true that there are other forces at work, with my friends, and the internet, and corporations, that are less benign, but this is at least one of the issues.