A three-minute documentary from "Attention Is All You Need" to AGI made entirely in code: about 7,400 lines of Remotion, SVG and Canvas illustration, open-source TTS narration and a Python-synthesised score.
By Chubby @kimmonismus Sep 23, 2026
You are a motion designer and creative director making a 3-minute animated short film, built entirely in code and rendered to MP4. The film Title: "Attention Is All You Need → AGI" The story of how a single 2017 paper led, step by step, to large language models, reasoning, tool-using AI agents, and to the open question of AGI. It should feel like a cinematic essay, not a slideshow or a timeline infographic. Think Kurzgesagt meets a Pixar opening sequence: emotional, clever, precise. Tech setup Use Remotion (React). Scaffold a fresh project, 1920x1080, 30 fps, exactly 180 s (5400 frames). One composition per scene, sequenced in a master composition. No external image assets or stock footage: everything is drawn with SVG, Canvas, CSS and code-generated particles and shapes. Google Fonts are fine. Before building, write STORYBOARD.md with each scene's timing, visuals, on-screen text and transitions. Then build scene by scene. After each scene, render 3–4 stills (npx remotion still) and look at them critically. Fix layout, overlaps, legibility and pacing before moving on. Finish with npx remotion render to out/film.mp4. Leave an optional <Audio> slot for a music track I can add later (public/music.mp3); render silently if it's missing. Narrative spine / recurring motif The protagonist is a single glowing token, the word "the", that travels through every era. In 2017 it's a lonely point that suddenly "sees" every other word through attention lines. Over time it gains a voice, senses (multimodality), reasoning, hands (tools) and finally a question. Scenes (approximate timing, you may rebalance) 0:00–0:15 — Cold open. Darkness. Words scattered like stars, disconnected. RNN-style sequential processing: words light up one by one, slowly forgetting the earlier ones. 0:15–0:35 — June 2017, "Attention Is All You Need" (Vaswani et al., Google). Every word connects to every other word at once. Attention lines bloom into a web. The title of the paper appears as if typeset. 0:35–0:55 — 2018–2020: the rise of large language models: GPT-1, BERT, GPT-2, GPT-3. Scaling laws: the web grows exponentially and the camera pulls back. The model starts completing sentences, fluent and uncanny. 0:55–1:20 — 2022: instruction tuning and RLHF, then ChatGPT (Nov 30, 2022). The token gets a chat bubble. A counter of users explodes. The world starts talking back. 1:20–1:40 — 2023: multimodality. Images, audio and code stream into the same web from all sides, and the token gains "senses." Every modality becomes tokens flowing through the same attention mechanism. 1:40–2:05 — 2024–2025: reasoning models. A visible chain of thought unfolds as branching, pruning, backtracking paths. The model "thinks before it speaks," with time slowing down. 2:05–2:30 — Tool use and agents. The token grows hands: it calls a search, runs code, opens files and orchestrates sub-agents. Many parallel threads work at once, and the screen becomes a busy, beautiful workshop. 2:30–2:50 — Toward AGI. All motifs converge. The web from 2017 reappears but is now planet-scale. Leave it ambiguous: no utopia, no doom. On screen: "Attention was all we needed. What comes next is up to us." (Improve this line if you can do better.) 2:50–3:00 — Resolve back to a single glowing token in darkness. Title card and end. Craft rules Accuracy matters: use correct years, names and paper titles. If you're unsure about a specific fact, leave it out rather than guess, and list any uncertain claims in NOTES.md. Typography: max ~8 words on screen at once, and leave every text visible long enough to read (≥ 2.5 s). Use one display font and one mono font for "model output." Motion: use spring and easing curves, never linear. Use scene transitions that grow out of the content (the web morphs, the camera zooms through a node), not generic fades. Color: a deep dark background with one warm accent color that evolves across eras. Details and easter eggs reward attention (e.g., real paper snippets, tiny UI details, plausible model outputs), similar to high-craft motion design. Pacing: alternate dense and calm moments, and give the reasoning scene and the AGI beat room to breathe. Work autonomously through the whole pipeline. When done, give me the path to the MP4, a short summary of creative decisions, and NOTES.md.
Quoted from Chubby's post. The prompt belongs to its creator; credit them if you share it.
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