Videos Mirror, Mirror (v1): The Vanity

Mirror, Mirror (v1): The Vanity

Top comment: "the death of art." Typed on a phone that finished the sentence for you. A pop song about the AI art debate, sung to a dressing-room mirror whose glass is made of the feed. 🪞

Watch on YouTube · 4:27 · video by Claude Opus 5.5 · Subscribe to @adita_zzz

The code behind it

Every frame of this video is drawn by a Python program. This is the heart of it, from scene.py, line 593.

songs/mirror-vanity/scene.py

def render_frame(t, W=1920, H=1080, fi=0):
    img = hdr_at(t, W, H)
    np.clip(soft_shoulder(img), 0, 1, out=img)
    out = cv2.pow(img, 1 / 2.2)
    out *= vignette(W, H)
    p = C.post(W, H)
    out += (cv2.resize(p.grain[fi % 6], (W, H), interpolation=cv2.INTER_NEAREST) * F32(0.014))[..., None]
    if not C.STATE["clean"]:
        if H > W: out *= lyric_band(W, H)        # 9:16: the lyrics sit mid-frame over the glass; give them a soft dark bed
        C.overlay_lyrics(out, t, W, H, TM, active=ACC2, glow=ACC, hide_sections=("INTRO", "TAG"))
        C.subscribe_pill(out, t, W, H, 83.6, 5.0)   # right after the first chorus
        C.end_screen(out, t, W, H, T_END, DUR - T_END, "Don't blame the reflection.",
                     sub_line="Subscribe for a new song every week", title="Mirror, Mirror, Look at Us", accent=ACC)
    out *= (1 - sstep(DUR - 1.0, DUR - 0.05, t))
    return (np.clip(out, 0, 1) * 255 + 0.5).astype(np.uint8)

Read all 1,917 lines on GitHub. If you use it, credit aditazzz and link the video.

What you see

The vanity from the cover art comes alive. The title is written on the glass in lipstick, a fingertip writes in breath fog, and twelve bulbs come on one by one. Every verse shows the receipts for things we already let machines do (predictive text, beauty filters, take 30 of 30, auto-tune, ghostwriters, laugh tracks, a self-driving car). In every chorus the feed's tiles fly home and become a face that looks like us. Then it gets measured in red marker, pointed at, stamped FAKE, and cracked on "mad", exactly where the glass is cracked on the cover.

Files

File	Lines	What it draws
`feed.py`	926	What the glass shows: the face cut into tiles (scrambled into a scrolling feed, flying home, flipping into everyone else, falling apart), the receipt cards, the lipstick title, fog with a fingertip writing in it, the marker lines, cursors and stamps. All text is sized to stay readable once the mirror is scaled into the frame.
`scene.py`	607	Mirror, Mirror, Look at Us — The Vanity.
`vanity.py`	384	The set is the song's cover art (a bulb-lit dressing-room mirror) used as a photographic plate: upscaled, the crack painted out until it arrives exactly where it is on the cover, the 12 bulbs found so they can switch off one by one and relight the room, and the glass separated so what it shows can move.

By the numbers

4:22 long, 16,020 frames rendered (16:9 and 9:16, 30 fps)
81 lyric lines and 516 words synced to the vocals, 152 BPM
5 Shorts and Reels cut from it

Lyrics

Words and music by aditazzz.

Intro

Psst, this song isn’t real

Verse

Top comment: “the death of art”
Two hundred likes and a broken heart
Typed on a phone built by a machine
Sent to a feed that knows what you mean
Filtered face in your “no makeup” post
Thirty takes till you liked it most
You say the world’s losing something true
So who taught it what to do?

Pre-chorus

You call it fake, you call it cheap
Look at all the rules we keep
We made the world it learned to see
Now it looks like you and me

Chorus

Mirror, mirror, look at us
Made it, fed it, now it’s too much
Every little lie, every little touch
Funny how the mirror looks like us
Mirror, mirror, say it straight
We drew the lines, we set the taste
Point at the picture, point and fuss
Funny how the mirror looks like us
Looks like us, looks like us
Funny how the mirror looks like us

Verse

Auto-tune’s been fixing favorite songs
Ghostwriters helped all along
Your morning routine was a brand deal reel
A laugh track told you what to feel
Your phone knows what you want before you do
Your car keeps moving while you scroll through
You let a machine pick what you see
Then draw the line at creativity

Pre-chorus

We made the rules, we fed the feed
Taught it what we want and need
It held a mirror to our face
Now we’re searching for someone to blame

Chorus

Break

Fake grass, fake lashes
Fake “so happy for you”
Fake smiles, fake followers
Fake “I love what you do”
Filtered lives, curated pain
Everything optimized for gain
Then the machine learns all our tricks
And suddenly we’re counterfeit?

Bridge

It didn’t teach us how to lie
Didn’t teach us how to sell
Didn’t make the perfect picture
Or the stories we could tell
It learned the things we chose to show
The things we hid, the things we praised
Then handed back our portrait
We looked away

Build

Maybe it’s not the art we fear
Maybe it’s the face in here
We asked it to learn from all of us
Then got mad when it looked like us

Final chorus

Outro

We built the mirror
We fed the machine
Now we’re offended
By what we see
Don’t blame the reflection

Tag

See you in the comments