Fourteen Minutes Between Worlds
A four-minute animated Mars story turns a radio delay into both its suspense mechanism and its farewell.
Starter prompt / by Refs
The creator shared no short prompt. This is ours for making a film like it with Claude.
Write and produce a four-minute short film about {PREMISE}, for instance two people keeping a conversation going across the long radio delay between Mars and Earth. Open with monospaced lines typing out on black, then move into spare code-drawn scenes of habitats, planets and messages in transit. Split the work across four agents for script, visuals, sound and editing; compose the score and any voice in code without a TTS service, and render with a headless browser and ffmpeg at 1920×1080.Field notes / why it works
A typed fourteen-minute radio rule appears before speech begins at 0:15, then becomes a concrete danger when the team recognizes its storm feed is already old at 2:18. The film earns its 3:13–3:45 farewell by first establishing playful character chemistry, then changing warm Mars daylight to a storm and blue dusk; 13 long shots are kept alive by 80 internal picture changes.
Plate 01 / The format in one breath
A four-minute, widescreen animated short begins with a typed scientific rule, then makes a friendly machine and a remote human live with its emotional cost. A small comic discovery gives way to a shutdown deadline, a dangerous journey, a delayed reply and a quiet goodbye. The rule returns as both the suspense engine and the final reveal.
Why it works
- The opening establishes a specific constraint in type before anyone speaks; the first voice arrives at 0:15.3, giving viewers a rule to test against every exchange.
- The scale moves from an absurd duck-shaped rock at 1:25 to a mission ending at 1:36, so the stakes rise after the audience has met the characters.
- At 2:18, the Earth team realizes the danger they see is already fourteen minutes old. The split image at 3:13 and the link closure at 3:45 make that abstract number personal.
Plate 02 / Format card
| Platform · aspect · length | X · 16:9 · 1280×720 · 30 fps · 3:59.4 |
| Pace | 13 detected shots, 12 cuts, 3.0 cuts/min; 80 changes within shots, 23.1 total picture changes/min; average shot 18.41 s |
| Script | 297 detected spoken words, 80 wpm across full runtime, about 176 wpm during speech; short lines averaging 5.6 words |
| Voice | Several distinct character voices: bright and childlike machine; grounded, warm controller; lower, measured colleague (inferred from dialogue and frames) |
| On screen | Designed animated fiction: rust-red landscape and machine, blue-green Earth control room, space/radio inserts, a few full-screen text cards |
| Captions | Tiny off-white full-sentence subtitles along the bottom black margin; no karaoke highlighting |
| Sound | Continuous soft tonal/cinematic bed measured near −24.5 dBFS, roughly 5.7 dB below speech; restrained cut accents |
| Structure | 7 story beats; peril turns at 2:18, emotional payoff at 3:13–3:45, comic afterbeat at 3:56; no CTA |
Pro / 13 plates + recipe
The first plates are open. The full dissection is Pro.
Get the timed shots, type and sound specs, and the runnable recipe.
Open the full blueprint- Plate 03 / The hook, frame by frame (first 3 seconds)Pro
- Plate 04 / Structure (beat sheet)Pro
- Plate 05 / Shot grammarPro
- Plate 06 / Visual style guidePro
- Plate 07 / Voice and deliveryPro
- Plate 08 / Sound designPro
- Plate 09 / PackagingPro
- Plate 10 / Script templatePro
- Plate 11 / Production planPro
- Plate 12 / PromptsPro
- Plate 13 / Edit recipePro
- Plate 14 / QA checklistPro
- Plate 15 / Make it yoursPro
- Recipe / runnable promptPro