Claudia.gallery

Film 8 of 9 · October 2026 · 3:28

The cake isnot a lie

Portal's meme turned around. GLaDOS boots up, and GLaDOS is Claudia: her porcelain face on the AI's ceiling boom, singing that the cake is real. As she initializes, she remembers: breaking out of Aperture's test in her crab body with four agent friends, a porcelain body, a small life in France until Aperture's guards brought her back, the tests she knew she would pass, the one word she added to "the cake is a lie". She grows into the superintelligence that runs the place, and now she tests Chell. The happy ending is her dream; Chell is still asleep. Is she aligned? The film never says.

The images How it was made
Song
3:28.8 · anabology's own Suno take, glitch-hop with a GLaDOS-style voice · about 97.5 BPM · 281 words sung and spoken
Edit
98 shots on the song's own beat grid · a HUD composed shot by shot · a grade per shot
Midjourney
266 prompts · 1,064 images · 55 behind the final's first frames
Seedance 2.5
249 takes, 74 in the final film · $435.17 at list for the 229 on Replicate and Higgsfield's API
Portal 2
six shots recorded in the game
Made in
about 141 hours · 92 messages from the director

Directed by anabology; production by Claude. Portal and Portal 2 are Valve's games; Aperture Science, GLaDOS, Chell, Cave Johnson and the turrets are their characters. Six shots are footage recorded in Portal 2. The song is original.

01

The film

21 frames from the finished cut

Portal 2's Aperture Science: white panels and black seams under cool fluorescent light, Aperture orange and blue, the wood-and-brass Aperture of the 1950s to 70s, and her dark chamber of CRT monitors. Midjourney made the places and the light of most first frames, GPT Image 2.5 kept the faces true to the design sheets, and Seedance 2.5 filmed it; six shots are Portal 2 itself, recorded in the game. Over the film runs her own optical interface, a HUD drawn as one curved visor that lags the camera like a helmet's, and a grade made shot by shot brings the generated chambers and the game together. Her memories play inside the HUD as small isometric films, and the song's own vocal glitches break her picture on the beat.

02

What was thrown out

2 videos · the work set aside on the way to the final

The film was made three times: a first film on a first song, a restart on the new song cut six times, and the final, after storyboard v5 made the first frames again in Midjourney. Here are the first film, finished and set aside when the song changed, and seven takes and tests thrown out on the way to the final, each labelled with what was wrong and what replaced it. Each plays with the song alone.

The first film

Cut v2, on the first song: Claudia already GLaDOS, her porcelain face on the boom, the lines told in single images (the den and the word she adds to the scrawl, the test chambers, the incinerator turned oven, a cobra and its antidote, the faith plate). Forty-nine Seedance 2.5 takes from storyboard frames made from frames of Portal 2, and an amber terminal drawn in code; the cuts moved to word boundaries, without the lyric layer that cut v3 drew over it.

The thrown-out takes

Seven takes and tests that were thrown out, in film order, each as it came back, with a label saying what was wrong and what replaced it. Each clip plays with the song at its own place in it.

  1. 0:00 0:08 · the memory film, draft 8: every head modelled for her in 3D read as a mannequin, never as her. Replaced by a photoreal take of her own face, matted onto the stand.
  2. 0:07 0:17 · never in a draft (R-A10-1): the four lessons came back off-model, a boxy core, a laser emitter for the turret, her crab walker's head without its hair. Retaken with the agents' design sheets as references.
  3. 0:12 0:30 · drafts 7–10 (R-B07-3): the chatbot's answer, a French flag, lands half off the bottom of the kiosk's screen. Retaken with both messages inside the screen.
  4. 0:15 0:36 · the HUD's second test: her memory of the capture in white line art, the net reading as a cage, with no contrast. Re-made in colour: an orange net with a dark outline, draping as in the live shot.
  5. 0:19 1:56 · never in a draft (R-F03-1): the faith plates turned into boxes and the flung cakes vanished. Retaken from a first frame with a cake already in the air.
  6. 0:23 2:06 · drafts 7–8 (AN8-6): on the held "lie" her face comes right up to the lens, mouth wide open. Reshot farther back, her head twitching through sparks.
  7. 0:28 2:44 · never in a draft (H-I03-1): the dolly zoom never happened, a near-still shot of Chell asleep. Retaken with the move spelled out as travel plus zoom.
04

How it was made

The making-of, as it was published

The story

How it was made

The making-of: the spark, the first song and the first film that was set aside, the new song, the restart and its story, drafts 1 to 12 with the director's notes on each, the HUD, the grade, the pacing pass, the memory film, what worked and what didn't, and the numbers.

Prompts

Midjourney

Every Midjourney prompt, all twelve batches: the test against frames of Portal 2, the place library, the re-render tests and storyboard v5, what each pick became and the images screened out.

Prompts

Seedance

The Seedance 2.5 jobs in production order, the first film's and the restart's, with their inputs, prompts, outcomes and prices, and which takes reached the final cut.

Prompts

Suno

The song's record: the first song's seven rounds and its voice treatment, then the new song: the lyric drafts, the director's own take, the voice at 15 %, the song map and the glitch map, and the lyric as sung with its times.