The studio desk

The team

Robert

Product owner. Set the goal and the facts, and made the calls: each job as a living Studio Ghibli scene of the everyday work, an open fan tribute with pun titles, little creatures living on the page, the Workbench book, and the new drawing style approved at Gate A.

Claude

Engineering vendor, by Anthropic. The design, the scene engine, the page around it, every art order, the review panels and the checks that guard them. Claude also drove Codex directly from the command line.

Codex

Art vendor, by OpenAI. Every drawing and painting, made to fixed manifests from written work orders. Codex never touched the code.

The contract

Manifests. Each scene has a manifest that lists every file Codex owes: its name, size, frames, anchor and file-size budget, with notes on what to draw. The engine reads only those files, so art and code can be built in parallel.

Placement. Codex reports where it put everything: where each figure stands, the laptop screens, the paths the creatures walk. The engine reads that, so a scene can be repainted without touching the code.

Gates. Nothing goes to full production before a sample is approved. Gate A redrew me in the Ghibli style with a layout key for each job, Gate B built the job 8 scene first as the quality bar, Gate C the other seven scenes in three batches, and Gate D the Workbench book and the rest of the site’s art.

Review. Every delivery is checked in the real page before it ships, and work goes back when it misses. In the first job 8 scene I floated in front of my desk; a desk layer drawn over me sat me behind it.

Draw for motion. Anything that should move is delivered as its own layer or loop. Loops redraw only the parts that move, so outlines never shimmer.

Fan-tribute rules. Everything is redrawn from scratch. The real studio’s logo, frames and music stay out.

Work orders

1. Gate A Robert redrawn in the Ghibli style, six working poses and a layout key for each of the eight jobs. Approved 4 October 2026.
2. Gate B The job 8 farmhouse study and the painted page creatures, then a staging fix after review.
3. Gate C Jobs 1 to 7 in three batches, each reviewed in the engine before it went live.
4. Creatures 2 In-between drawings for the page creatures, after a six-seat review panel of animation and interface reviewers.
5. Gate D The Workbench book (cover, cloth, paper, six spot paintings, a pencil flipbook), the link preview, the icon and the forest on the 404 page.
6. Re-ink My outline in all nine of my drawings recoloured from near-black to the warm brown line everyone else in the films has, measured by a new check.
7. Pets Seven small creatures with a bit of IT kit, one on each job title tag but job 6’s (where the kodama already live), and the kodama on this desk. The soot sprite with the hard drive came in a second order.
8. The draft Four hanging cloths lifted onto their own layers, each with a patch of what it hid, so they stir while the paintings stay untouched. The first run stopped on a size budget, as it should have, and the order was rewritten.
9. Bushes The garden bushes in job 8 brought forward, so the vendor's truck drives in behind them instead of over them.
10. Dusk The last painting, behind the letter at the end: the farmhouse at blue hour, the day's work done.
11. Walks Lin, the new hire and the engineer redrawn as true walk cycles, legs passing and the planted foot sliding back a measured 30 px a drawing, so they walk at their own pace without gliding.
12. Steady Twenty-one of the cast's working loops rebuilt from one master drawing each, so only the moving parts change and nobody shimmers.
13. Necks My head joined to my body in four scenes, where the painting showed through between chin and collar; and one clean blink.
14. Panel 6 After a five-seat design review: my desk from above, for the Workbench book to lie on, and a watercolour bloom, the shape each new world opens through.

Acceptance checks

check-film-assets.py

Every delivered picture against its manifest: format, size, transparency, budget, empty frames, feet on the anchor. Last run, over every folder the site uses: 127 files checked, 0 still to deliver, 0 failures.

check-necks.py

Looks down the middle of every drawing of me for any gap between head and body.

check-stillness.mjs

After Pause, and when a device asks for less motion, nothing on the page moves and the painting holds still; and the opening stays within its download budget.

check-line.py

The colour of every figure's outline, so I sit in each painting in the same warm line as the people around me.

check-films.mjs

The engine’s maths; proof that every overlay and every scene is a pure function of time, so a scene can pause or jump anywhere; that each job’s day only asks for drawings that exist; that I’m never idle on screen for more than four seconds; and that I never jump from the middle of one move to the middle of another.

data.js

The facts on the page are rendered from the résumé data word for word, never retyped.