riso-windowseat

Procedural risograph films and prints, each a single index.html of Canvas 2D and Web Audio: no libraries, fonts, images or network calls. The repo began as the release of Window Seat. Making it, and the two shorts before it, produced a reusable kit of Claude Code skills, craft docs and a render harness. Roost, Held, Nonpareil, Eclosion and Passenger were made with it next, and two print series, Cabinet and Sceneries.

All are 1080 × 1080, 30 fps. MP4s are on the v1.0 release. To watch the source instead, open any index.html in a browser and press play.

A night train journey seen through one fixed window with a glass of water on the sill. Every pixel and every sound except the piano is procedural.

The score, "A Light Left in the Window", is an original piano piece in 6/8 whose phrasing follows the picture's timeline. The glass of water leans with every acceleration and is the last thing to settle.

A murmuration over a marsh in one fixed view. Each starling is a 2–3 px ink dot, so the flock is the halftone: where the sheet turns edge-on, the birds pile into dark printed ribbons. A falcon stoops through it and the flock pours into the reeds at nightfall. The string score is timed from the picture.

A paper kite's line frays and parts at a hillside stake. Loose, it can only tumble; it falls across a harbour town, is snagged for a moment by a church weathervane, and over the water its line catches on a sloop's forestay, so the kite climbs again, held by the boat sailing into dusk. Its tail and loose line are simulated ropes. The score uses CC0 mbira, harp, glockenspiel, chimes, strings and flute, with every cue read from the picture's events.

Paper marbling seen straight down into the bath. Drops of colour land on the beat and push each other outward; a rake and a fine comb drag them into the nonpareil pattern, and a flower is dropped and pulled into the middle. A sheet unrolls across the bath, is peeled back toward the lens like a turning page, and lands face up and mirrored beside the emptied tray. The marbling is closed-form geometry, so every frame is exact. The drops are the handpan's notes, over a slow cello and contrabass line.

One monarch's first morning, in one continuous macro take. A jade chrysalis clears and splits; the butterfly drops out, hangs from the empty shell and pumps its crumpled wings full in six slow pulses while its swollen abdomen shrinks. It turns, opens its wings twice and flies, and the camera returns to the empty case, framed as the chrysalis was in the first second. The wings are a planar 3D model whose pattern was measured from a specimen photograph, layered by depth so the body reads right from the side, from behind and in flight. A slow trio in F for vibraphone, clarinet and horn shares the picture's clock.

A child of this repo and alexgreensh/anidoodle: Window Seat's window and glass of water, and anidoodle's drawing that makes itself and then comes alive. Before dawn a butterfly draws itself in the fog on a train window, stroke by stroke in the order a finger would. Its clear lines are windows, so lamps slide through the drawing and the dawn fills its wings. The sunrise warms it off the glass and the camera pulls back from the pane to the seat. It lands on the rim of the glass of water and drinks, and the butterfly-shaped hole it left stays in the fog. The score is procedural, from the shared kit: every mark of the drawing is a note, and the opening motif is answered as the wings open.

Still series driven like a film (each integer time is one print) and exported as native 2160 × 2160 PNGs with tools/still.mjs.

Cabinet: five plates from an imaginary natural-history cabinet (a sectioned nautilus, arranged diatoms, a luna moth, a cut agate, a sunflower), each built from its own growth geometry and cut as fine line over screened colour.

Sceneries: a curved viaduct in fog, a cliff village at dusk over its own reflection, and a stepped canyon at sunrise.

I directed each work; Claude Code (Anthropic's coding agent) wrote the code, using the skills, rules and docs in this repo. A work is designed in its FILM.md or PRINT.md, its hardest frame is proved first, and then it is inspected as frame strips, 1:1 crops and loudness sheets rendered by tools/. Every frame is a pure function of time (seek(t)), so any moment can be inspected exactly and the MP4 cannot drop frames. Each record keeps the design decisions and measurements, and lists the work's remaining weaknesses.

git clone https://github.com/sevenevesai/riso-windowseat
cd riso-windowseat/tools
npm install && npm run setup && npm test

Then open Claude Code in the repo root and ask, for example:

• "Make a 40 second riso film of a lighthouse keeper's night."
• "Make a riso poster of a heron on a pier at dusk."
• "Score this film" or "The rain at 66 s is too loud."
• "Extend Window Seat with a snowy mountain pass after the lake."

CLAUDE.md gives the session the contract and commands. The riso-film, riso-still and riso-score skills in .claude/skills/ carry the workflow and gates. Each skill's examples.md points to the routines in the shipped films that are worth reusing. A hook warns when an edit breaks determinism.

MIT, see LICENSE. The piano recordings embedded in Window Seat are Salamander Grand Piano V3 by Alexander Holm under CC BY 3.0; see AUDIO-SOURCES.md. The string recordings embedded in Roost are VSCO 2 Community Edition by Versilian Studios under CC0 1.0; see AUDIO-SOURCES.md. Held's instruments are from Versilian's VCSL and VSCO 2, also CC0 1.0; see AUDIO-SOURCES.md. Nonpareil's handpan is GAMEDRIX974's HandPan pack on Freesound and its cello and contrabass are from VSCO 2, all CC0 1.0; see AUDIO-SOURCES.md. Eclosion's vibraphone (VCSL), clarinet and horn (VSCO 2) are CC0 1.0; see AUDIO-SOURCES.md. Its wing geometry is measured from "Danaus plexippus MHNT dos.jpg" by Didier Descouens (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0); see FILM.md.