Don’t buy (or sub to) an AI film studio — build one. That’s the whole pitch of the breakdown video: a complete production office that lives in one folder on your desktop, and the entire folder — markdown files, prompt templates, production tracker — is a free download in Theoretically News.
This is the full walkthrough of how Paperclip Heart was made — every mistake, workaround, and weird ring-light bug included.
The production office
The system is a Claude-powered setup that handles the unglamorous work of a production: story breakdowns, character reference grids, scene boards, and asset tracking. Pre-production starts with Claude plus deep research; from there the folder becomes the studio — one place where the story, the boards, and the trackers all live as plain files.
MCPs: the big unlock
The piece that changes the workflow is MCP. With Claude connected to Martini — the lab this workflow runs in, and the sponsor of the video — you direct shots by chat, and generations run while you keep working on something else. Mind the tokens when you work in parallel, and keep handoff docs around for when the context window fills up.
It’s not all smooth: big-brain models on dumb jobs is a real failure mode, character consistency took work (Eli kept drifting back to default face), and the ring light did something genuinely weird. It’s all in the video.
The edit and the audio chain
Editing happens with full project context — Martini’s built-in editor has an XML export trick for getting the cut out — and the audio cleanup chain runs through Adobe Podcast Enhance Speech, Brainworx Cleansweep (still free), and Valhalla Supermassive (also free).
The bottom line
The final tally for Paperclip Heart: 53 shots, 160 generations. The full time-and-cost breakdown is in the video, along with where this is heading next — Gaussian splats and multiplayer.
One more note: shortly after the video wrapped, an alternate version of the Studio got rebuilt with Claude Fable 5 — that one’s coming in the newsletter.