Videos Thirsty (The Data Center Next Door)

Thirsty (The Data Center Next Door)

It rolled into town with a ribbon and a shovel, promised a thousand jobs, and built a big gray house without a single window. Now it hums all night, drinks the river and runs up the light bill. A small town in a toxic relationship with the data center next door. 🎃

Watch on YouTube · 3:47 · 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 743.

songs/thirsty-the-data-center-next-door/scene.py

def render_frame(t, W=1920, H=1080, fi=0):
    bh = E.band_height(W, H) if W > H else H
    k = SCALE
    if k < 0.999:
        w2, h2 = int(round(W * k / 2) * 2), int(round(bh * k / 2) * 2)
        img, d = picture(t, w2, h2)
        img = cv2.resize(img, (W, bh), interpolation=cv2.INTER_LINEAR)
    else:
        img, d = picture(t, W, bh)
    img = np.maximum(img, 0)
    overlays_linear(img, t, d)
    title_linear(img, t)
    out = E.develop(img, fi)
    full = E.letterbox(out, H, bh) if bh < H else out
    overlays_display(full, t, d, W, H, bh)
    full *= (1 - sstep(DUR - 1.0, DUR - 0.05, t))
    return (np.clip(full, 0, 1) * 255 + 0.5).astype(np.uint8)
    ...

Read all 4,908 lines on GitHub. If you use it, credit aditazzz and link the video.

What you see

One valley, built once in 3-D: a town on the near bank, a river, and across it a windowless facility that breathes. Its wall-wash lights swell and fade with the groove, steam pours off its roof, and every shot is just a camera somewhere in that world. The town cuts the ribbon at dusk, and most of the song is night. A glass of water drains on every chorus, the electric meter on her house spins up, and the bill's bars climb to YOUR LIMIT. Her lawn fills with somebody else's server racks until every LED turns red on "yard". The river sits a little lower every time the chorus comes back, until the bed is dry and cracked. In the bridge she gets two minutes of public comment in a fluorescent town hall, and at the end the town's windows turn blue one by one. She is only ever a silhouette.

Files

File	Lines	What it draws
`analyze.py`	116	Audio analysis on top of the pipeline's beats and words: envelopes for the bass hum, snare, hats and loudness, every kick and snare, the section changes and the vocal's breathing, written to `build/analysis.json` with a picture of it all for checking by eye.
`cover_square.py`	101	The square album cover (3000 × 3000), rendered from the video's own world: her profile at the river railing at dusk against the lit wall of the windowless facility, its steam rising into the last light.
`qa_flicker.py`	34	A quality check: scans a rendered video for flicker against the shot list, flagging brightness jumps that aren't on a cut and strobing within half a second.
`scene.py`	769	The film: a small town in a toxic relationship with the windowless data center across its river. The building is the lover (it never sleeps, breathes with the groove and drinks the river down chorus by chorus); she is only ever a silhouette. Every shot is anchored to sung words and downbeats.
`sync_fix.py`	121	Second-opinion word timing: the full mix is transcribed too, both transcripts are aligned to the lyrics and merged word by word, which recovers the words the vocal stem missed (the whispered "And who's paying yours?", the echoes).
`ys_assemble.py`	41	Joins the chunks rendered on two machines into the final file, checking every chunk first, and adds the hum-cleaned audio.
`ys_chunks.py`	55	Renders the 16:9 chunks (1080p, 1440p or 4K) over a frame range, forward or backward, inside a time budget, so two machines can split the song from both ends.
`ys_details.py`	563	The close-ups: the electric bill, the river's edge, the cooling fans, the meter, the glass of water, the server racks.
`ys_eng.py`	517	The rendering kit: a camera with a real focal length and a slow handheld drift, a canvas that keeps every pixel's depth, tileable noise, height fog, point lights with their reflections in the water, and the film finish (halation, bloom, filmic curve, grade, grain, letterbox). Every frame is a pure function of t.
`ys_her.py`	238	Her: an elegant silhouette with a mass of backlit curls, never a face in detail and never lip-sync. Drawn from hand-placed outline curves in five poses, her hair's edge broken into hundreds of small curls with light shining through.
`ys_house.py`	214	Her house on Willow Road, a two-storey farmhouse on the river bank with its porch facing the facility, and what ends up in her yard: server racks (one, then a row, then the whole lawn) and the electric meter.
`ys_people.py`	217	The ribbon cutting and her cousin's booth at the gate: silhouettes of men in suits, a red ribbon cut on "ribbon", gold shovels in fresh dirt, the security fence, and the booth with the man inside.
`ys_rooms.py`	318	The interiors: her bedroom, built inside her house in the valley so its window shows the real valley, with Venetian-blind shadows traced per pixel for the noir stripes; and the council chamber.
`ys_sky.py`	179	Skies and steam: twilight to night per pixel, a cloud deck lit from below by the sunset or by the facility's light dome, stars, the sky reflected in the river, and the billowing steam plumes above the cooling stacks.
`ys_town.py`	120	Town pieces: the high school with its new roof, the water tower, and the construction cranes for the second facility.
`ys_type.py`	367	Typography: the lyrics as subtitles in the lower letterbox bar (Cormorant Garamond, dirty ivory, each word rising as it's sung), "thirsty" as a large italic ghost in the haze, the $5, $10 and $25 prices, and the dripping THIRSTY title.
`ys_world.py`	938	The valley: one town, one river, two facilities and a pylon line, all in one world, so every shot is just a camera in it.

By the numbers

3:47 long, 13,598 frames rendered (16:9 and 9:16, 30 fps), plus a native 2560×1440 master for YouTube
58 lyric lines and 361 words synced to the vocals, 136 BPM
70 shots on one timeline, every cut on the song's own structure
The album cover is rendered from the same world, at 3000×3000 (cover_square.py)

Lyrics

Words and music by aditazzz.

Intro

Thirsty...
You're so thirsty.

Verse

You rolled into town with a ribbon and a shovel,
promised me the future and a thousand jobs.
Built a big gray house without a single window,
and you hum all night, and you never stop.

Pre-chorus

You keep your lights on twenty-four-seven,
I turn mine off just to pay the bill.
Everybody's got a number, baby,
and you're about to hit mine.

Chorus

You're so thirsty (thirsty)
drinking up my river every night.
You're so thirsty (thirsty)
running up my light bill out of sight.
Five dollars? Baby, you can stay.
Ten dollars? Mm, okay, okay.
Twenty-five? Get your servers out my yard,
'cause you're drinking my water and charging my card.

Post-chorus

Thirsty... (thirsty)
Always wanting more.
Thirsty... (thirsty)
What you asking for?

Verse

Okay, I'll give you this: you fixed the high school roof,
paid your taxes early, gave my cousin work.
He watches your front gate from a little booth,
thinks you're not so bad, thinks you're worth it.
But the creek's running low, and the summer's getting long,
and the hum's in my sleep, and the hum's in my song.
And you're asking for a second house next door,
like you've never heard the word "no" before.

Pre-chorus

You keep your lights on twenty-four-seven,
I turn mine off just to pay the bill.
Everybody's got a number, baby,
and you're about to hit mine.

Chorus

Bridge

Public comment. Two minutes.
Hi. I live on Willow Road.
I'm not against the future.
I just want to know who's paying for it.

Final chorus

Outro

So what's your number?
Five? Ten?
Twenty-five?
And who's paying yours?