How I make my videos with Claude Code

The 10 effects

Every effect is a short Python function Claude Code wrote for me (OpenCV, Pillow and ffmpeg). The trick behind most of them is a clean cut-out of me in every frame, made with RobustVideoMatting, which is free and open source. Film yourself on a tripod and also record 30 seconds of the empty room. That clean plate makes the cut-outs much better.

Prompts you can paste into Claude Code, one per effect:

1. Glitch: Add a 0.8 s RGB-split glitch with frame stutter to the start of this clip.
2. Vertigo: Dolly-zoom: keep me the same size while the background stretches behind me.
3. Neon trace: Cut me out and draw a glowing neon outline around me that draws itself on.
4. Clone: Put two more copies of me either side, slightly smaller, same timing.
5. Frame break: Put me inside a picture frame, but let my head and arm break out of it.
6. Before/after: Slider wipe: flat ungraded on the left, your best grade on the right.
7. Text behind me: A giant word behind my head, with me cut out in front of it.
8. Phone mockup: Shrink the video into a phone screen on a dark background.
9. Sticky text: Pin a label to my raised hand and make it follow the hand.
10. Pull-back: Pull back to reveal the video playing on an editor screen.

Tell it to check its own output: "make a contact sheet of every second and look at it before you say it's done."

My editing setup

1. Film on my phone, on a tripod. Raw files go into one folder.
2. Claude Code transcribes every take locally with faster-whisper and picks the best take of each line.
3. It cuts the dead air so every pause is about a fifth of a second, then checks every word is still there by transcribing it again.
4. Audio: high-pass, a cut for room boxiness, a lift for presence, gentle compression, then loudness set to -14 LUFS (no pitch changes, ever).
5. Graphics and effects are code, rendered with ffmpeg.
6. A second AI reviews it. Codex gets a contact sheet of the finished video and answers SHIP or FIX with timestamps. Nothing reaches me until it says SHIP.
7. Thumbnails: Codex's image generation. In a blind test it beat Claude's.

Tools: Claude Code, Codex CLI, ffmpeg, faster-whisper, RobustVideoMatting. All except the two AI subscriptions are free.

How Claude Code "moved" me

1. I sat in one chair and filmed. I also filmed 30 seconds of the empty room.
2. RobustVideoMatting cut me out of every frame. Claude Code then cleaned the edges against the empty-room shot, so no white wall fringe and no see-through hands.
3. Each background is one image prompt (no retries) to Codex's image generator, written for the same camera height and lens as my shot.
4. Claude Code matched my lighting to each scene (brightness, colour tint and a soft edge wrap) and put me in.

The core of the prompt I used for every place (swap the location):

The 10 Claude skills I use

1. Watch: lets Claude "watch" any reel (frames plus transcript) and break down why it works.
2. Competitor formula: finds what's popping on YouTube this week in my niche.
3. Viral hooks: writes and stress-tests my first 2 seconds.
4. Storytelling: but/therefore story structure for scripts.
5. Video use: cuts raw footage from a transcript.
6. Voiceover: radio edit plus a podcast voice chain.
7. HyperFrames: motion graphics written as code.
8. Frame check: contact sheets of every shot, checked before I see anything.
9. Multiplier review: which of my videos beat my normal, and what to double down on.
10. Skill creator: turns my feedback into new rules so mistakes don't repeat.

A skill is just a folder with a SKILL.md file of instructions in ~/.claude/skills/. Start with one for the job you repeat most.