Emmie Is Four

My daughter Emmie turns four this month. Last weekend we took her to a children's opera at our local theater, and it got me thinking. I've never really listened to opera. But it's music and a story at the same time, and that's exactly what these lyric videos need.

So I made her one, and I couldn't be happier with how it turned out.

The cast

The stars are Emmie's real stuffies: Elephant, Koala and Polar Bear. Those are their actual names, because that's what she calls them. They're all girls, and Elephant is the leader. I described them to Claude in a couple of sentences (a small white polar bear, a blue koala, and a light gray-blue elephant a little bigger than the koala) and they came back as paper puppets on sticks in a pink toy theatre.

Emmie and her brother Liam don't appear on screen anywhere. We don't put the kids themselves in AI images, so the song is about her and the stuffies do the performing.

Everything in it is hers

Instead of handing over a topic, I asked Claude to quiz me about her. It sent back sixteen questions, and nearly every answer made it into the lyrics:

• She wears her pink ballerina outfit almost every day, and she talks about "taking her place at the bar."
• Her favorite foods are pizza, cheeseburgers and goodles (that's mac and cheese).
• She asked for a cauldron for her birthday and loves playing Room on the Broom, dressed as the witch.
• She loves the "Halloween guys," the skeletons and ghosts in the neighbors' yards.
• Liam, who's about to turn two, calls her "Emmie-son." She calls him "Liam-son" right back.

So the chorus is "Emmie is four! Emmie's a ballerina, hear the crowd roar!", and the last line is "Emmie is four, and Liam-son's almost two!" There's also a deep, comedic "Brava! Bravissima!" from Elephant that I'm hoping gets a laugh at the party.

Why opera works

My other songs are fast electropop with a scene for every line. Here the style prompt was "Nutcracker meets Gilbert and Sullivan": a full orchestra, an overture, a waltz for the ballet bridge, a trio on the chorus and a music box at the end.

Opera gives the video a structure the visuals can follow. There's a curtain, a cast, acts, a big finale and a bow. Every scene has an obvious job, and the characters can sing to each other instead of just illustrating a lyric.

The next day I tried a second opera on a different topic, and it felt old and slow. The one for Emmie feels fast and modern, I think because the writing is quick and silly and specific. I'm going to keep using opera, but it's the jokes and the details that carry it.

How long it took

About an hour and a half from the first message to the finished 3:33 video, using my lyric-film skill. Claude made the song in Suno through the Chrome extension, timed every word, and had five subagents build eighteen scenes in parallel. A couple of scene transitions went back for fixes, and one spotlight came out too dark and got brightened.

Her fourth birthday party is next weekend. I can't wait to show it to her and Liam.