The local machine
50 plates
Plates between 21:53 and 22:11, 2 sprites, 32 ambience beds, and 115 voice lines that came first, from 21:48 to 21:53.
Real-time film · 15:33 · production notes · 7 October 2026
Tesla: Invisible Fire
A fifteen-minute, thirty-three-second film about Nikola Tesla as one question asked at the age of three, told in 50 painted scenes with every bolt, spark and lamp animated in code. A single Opus director and one Opus researcher made it in under an hour and a half. This is where the time and the money went.
The session in four numbers
From a request to a published film
1 h 23 minfrom the request at 21:18 to the final report at 22:41
1 h 41 minof agent working time, with the researcher running alongside
2 agentsone Opus director and one Opus researcher
$19.17if every call had been billed at API list prices
15:33 film11 chapters54 shots114 lines, 2,085 words4 voices50 plates32 ambience beds1,950 lines of film code21 sources
The evening
21:18 to 22:41
Each bar is one agent, from its first instruction to its last report; each thin mark is a tool call. The four local rows mark every voice line, picture, sprite and ambience bed the machine produced. The researcher ran for the first 18 minutes while the director wrote the script.
Opus 5.5Sonnet 5.5Haiku 5.5Local machine, no API cost
The company
Who did what, for how long, at what price
| Agent and assignment | Ran (local) | Time | API calls | Tool calls | Cost at list prices |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Director · Opus 5.5 | |||||
| Director: orchestration, review and export | 21:18–22:41 | 1 h 23 min | 130 | 151 | $16.25 |
| Research · Opus 5.5 | |||||
| Research Tesla fact sheet | 21:22–21:41 | 18 min | 81 | 92 | $2.92 |
| 2 agents | 211 | 243 | $19.17 | ||
The bill
Where $19.17 went
By role
Director · $16.25 · 85%Script, plates, the code that animates every bolt and lamp, the score, review and publishing.
Researcher · $2.92 · 15%One fact sheet that corrected five popular myths before the script was written.
By model
By kind of token
The director, hour by hour
Each gap between two transcript events is given to the tool call or message that ended it, then sorted by tool name, file path and command. The buckets are keyword matches, so read them as proportions. 1 h 23 min in all.
The film
What the evening produced
Four voices
114 lines
The narrator, af_heart at 0.92, speaks 97 lines; Tesla, in his own documented words, am_fenrir at 0.85, speaks 14; Edison, am_michael, speaks 2; the Graz professor, bm_george, speaks 1.
The score
A two-note pulse
Composed in code: a two-note alternating pulse for the current, a rising theme for Tesla that moves from minor to major, a waltz for Chicago, and near silence for the ditch and the pigeon. Thunder, sparks and the blast are timed from the same file as the animation.
The page
15 MB mix, 33 MB file
A single-file page of 33 MB with a review page that plays every line, image and sound clip. The session’s own export estimate was 20 to 30 minutes for the MP4.
What the checks caught
Three dissolves that crashed playback
The user started the first full playback and it stopped, with an error from the canvas about a negative radius. The director traced it to three dissolves and fixed them all.
| Where it failed | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Around 4:38 on the first full playback, at the dissolve into the harbour (chimney smoke), reported as 4:59 in the fix | The incoming shot starts drawing a moment before its own start time. A looping effect computed a negative size in that overlap, and the browser rejects a negative gradient radius, which stopped playback | Loops now behave before a shot’s start |
| 10:22, into Madison Square Garden (the boat’s radio rings) | The same early draw | The same fix |
| 12:05, into the globe (the World System rings) | The same early draw | The same fix |
| Any future error in a shot | A thrown error used to stop the player | The player logs it and shows that shot’s painting instead |
Accuracy
Five popular claims the research corrected
Every legend in the film is labelled as one, and the in-player Sources panel lists 21 sources. The credits say the painted scenes are imagined reconstructions.
| Popular claim | What the research found | Handling |
|---|---|---|
| Tesla glued sixteen May bugs to his motor | Four | Corrected before the script |
| The Statue of Liberty greeted him in New York | She was not there yet; only her pedestal was going up | Shown as a building site |
| Edison said “you don’t understand our American humor” | No source has him saying it | Corrected before the script |
| Tesla tore up a royalty contract | He gave up the royalties | Corrected before the script |
| The 1943 Supreme Court ruling made him the inventor of radio | It did not | Corrected before the script |
Left for the listener
Three things only ears can judge
The director could measure the mix but could not hear it, and said so in the hand-over.
| To check by ear | What was noted | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Music under narration | The music sits only about 3 dB below the speech on average | Left for the listener |
| Narrator pace | About 170 words a minute after slowing her down | Left for the listener |
| Name pronunciations | Đuka, Mačak and Szigeti are spelled out phonetically for the voice | Left for the listener |
What it taught
Five things the numbers say
Two agents made it
The director cost $16.25, 85% of the $19.17 total, and one Opus researcher cost $2.92. There were no per-chapter animators, so the film cost $1.23 per finished minute against about $13 for the later films.
The paintings carried the picture
Fifty painted plates and two sprites supplied the scenes, and about 1,950 lines of code animated the electricity on top: the lightning title, the rotating magnetic field, DC against AC, Chicago 1893 and Wardenclyffe. The later films used 11,000 to 22,000 lines.
The research changed the script
The Opus researcher ran 18 min and corrected five popular claims before they reached the narration. Legends are labelled as legends, and the player lists 21 sources.
The check that mattered came from the first playback
The earlier checks had sampled only a few moments in each shot, which is how three dissolves that crashed playback slipped through. The director then scanned every frame of the repacked film, 56,000 in all, and recorded that every film gets a full scan before hand-over.
The MP4 came later
The session ended with the playable page and an offer to export. The 227 MB MP4 and its 51 MB compressed copy were made on 9 October, outside this session.
Method
How these figures were measured
Measured from the session's own transcripts: the director's, and one for each of the 1 agents it launched. Assistant messages are deduplicated by message id and the last entry's usage is kept. Models come from each agent's metadata.
Cost is what the usage would have cost at API list prices in October 2026: Opus 5.5 at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output, Sonnet 5.5 at $2 and $10, Haiku 5.5 at $0.10 and $0.50 (higher rates above a 100,000-token prompt), cache reads at 0.05 times input, cache writes at 1.25 times (five minutes) or 2 times (one hour). A subscription session was not billed this way, so treat the dollar figures as a measure of work, not an invoice.
Times are UK local time (BST, UTC+1). Local-machine marks are the modification times of the generated files. The myths, the playback failure, its fix and the notes for the listener come from the director’s own messages in the session; the MP4 sizes and dates come from the project’s files. The hour-by-hour split sorts tool calls by keyword, and gaps of more than 20 minutes with no events are left out of it.