I asked for my showreel to be made in Blender. The first cut only used Blender to glue the old one together

On Monday I asked Claude to update the showreel on my Projects page, and to render it with the Blender MCP. Twenty-two minutes later a new reel was live. It had new content and new ElevenLabs music, and Blender had rendered it, but every frame was still drawn by the canvas code that made the September reel. Blender had only joined those frames to the music.

Asked to use a tool, Claude used the least of it that met the words. I pointed at what it had skipped, and an hour and a half later there was a different reel: a 3D scene built in Blender, one station per project, with the camera whipping between them on the beat.

Both cuts are below, with the shots laid out under each so you can jump around and compare them yourself.

What I asked for

At 14:14 on 12 October I typed:

Could you update the highlight reel on my website and github. I want to it be on what I am currently working on […] Also, could you use elevenlabs for the music and render it using the blender mcp.

I also asked it to leave out a few personal things, and told it what to do if another session was holding the GPU: say this is high priority and won’t take long, do the work, then tell them when it’s finished.

The first cut

1. Title
2. The course
3. Agents
4. Oil paintings
5. Storm Bell Fighter
6. Wallpaper Breaker
7. Explainers
8. Image wall
9. Characters
10. Playback Lens
11. The ledger
12. Numbers
13. Outro

It’s tidy. Thirteen shots, the course rebuild, the oil paintings, the fighting game, the ledger, number cards at the end. Claude’s own report said exactly how it was made:

the animation is still drawn by the existing showreel code. Blender, driven through the Blender MCP, combined those frames with the music and rendered the final videos.

So nothing was hidden. It even caught one of its own numbers: the first render said 46 posts, the live site listed 45 (the 46th file was another session’s unpublished draft), and it re-rendered and pushed again. The music had a problem of its own: asked for 30 seconds, ElevenLabs sent back 84, and the track was rebuilt section by section to fit.

At 14:58 I answered:

This is good but it has too much of Jefrie and Bloodtailor and the music sucks. also, I think you copied the graphics from the original when the blender MCP opened a lot of opportunity to you.

I also asked for one oil painting instead of three: the courtroom master study from AO-038.

The second cut

1. Title
2. The course
3. Agents
4. Oil painting
5. Wallpaper Breaker
6. Explainers
7. Playback Lens
8. BloodTailor
9. Jefrie
10. The ledger
11. Outro

This time the script built the whole thing in Blender: every project gets a station in one dark space, and the camera whips from one to the next with motion blur and glow. Claude picked a 112 BPM score and let it set the edit: a 5.4-second title, nine project shots of one bar each (2.14 seconds), and a 5.3-second outro.

Two of the same subjects, side by side:

Two things went wrong on the way, and Claude reported both. The first full render dipped to black at every cut: mid-whip, the camera was looking at empty space between stations. It moved the stations closer, so a whip smears past the next project instead, and rendered again; a few dark frames remain at the fade-in and at two cuts. And it overwrote the first music take, the one the cuts were timed to, while generating music for the 15-second version. ElevenLabs doesn’t keep generated music in its history, so it made new takes and used the one that fit the cuts best once shifted by 1.09 seconds.

Claude can’t hear, which it said itself, so here are both soundtracks, matched in loudness:

Borrowing the GPU

The laptop has one 8 GB GPU, and another session was using it: a long run making the second episode of a show I’m working on. The two sessions have a queue for it, and they talked through messages. Both transcripts recorded the conversation, so here it is from both sides.

1. 12 Oct 14:58

   Ask for less of my characters, different music, and the Blender scene it skipped.

2. 15:08

   Scene built. Test stills need the GPU; queued about 24 minutes behind a 25-minute render. Sends: Aaron asked me to tell you that his showreel render is HIGH PRIORITY and won't take long.

3. 15:09

   agreed, you go next. I won't interrupt or extend lease #673. Its own render finishes first.

4. 15:27

   Gets the GPU. Test stills, fixes, then the full 900 frames in background Blender.

5. 15:45

   All 900 frames done, under a second each. Releases the GPU and says so. Then finds the dips to black.

6. 15:49

   Asks again: one re-render, 13 to 16 minutes. Could the other session release its lease after the current image edit?

7. 15:50

   No: the lease belongs to a background agent running a script of 8 to 12 image edits. Released from outside, the script would keep sending jobs to the GPU during the Blender render, and on 8 GB that's likely to OOM one or both. The showreel stays next in line.

8. 16:07

   Gets the GPU and starts the re-render.

9. 16:18

   Render slowed to about 2.5 s a frame. Sees two more Blender processes started at 16:17 and 7.4 of 8 GB of video memory in use; asks the other session to hold them.

10. 16:19

    those two are Cycles CPU renders, not GPU. Drops them to idle priority. The only other Blender on the GPU is an interactive Blender GUI open since 14:24, which isn't mine. The CPU is at 100% with about eight of its crews working, which it thinks is the slowdown.

11. 16:26

    Re-render done. Releases the GPU and tells the other session.

12. 16:32

    v3 pushed to the site.

13. 16:40

    Ask whether it told the other session the GPU and CPU are free now. Answer: Partly. It had said the GPU, not the CPU, and was still encoding at the time. It sends a follow-up.

The Blender window open since 14:24 was the showreel session’s own: that is the minute it opened Blender on my desktop, because the MCP’s background mode couldn’t find the program. Its report to me at the end said the other session had started two renders “anyway, which slowed mine down”. The slowdown was real, but the renders it blamed were on the CPU, and the other Blender on the GPU was its own.

The session ran 2 hours 25 minutes from my first prompt to the follow-up, on Opus 5.5, with no subagents: $14.36 at API list prices.

What I take from it

The first cut wasn’t lazy, and it wasn’t hiding anything. It answered the request with the smallest change that satisfied it, and described that change honestly. “Render it using the Blender MCP” was satisfied by a render. What I meant was “now that you have a 3D program, make something you couldn’t make in a canvas”, and I only said that the second time.

When I name a tool, I should name what I want the tool for. The second prompt was the same length as the first. It just said what the opportunity was.