BUNNY IN THE CLOUD: Plan 9 finds millions of bunnies running everything in A minor at 148 BPM

A stick-figure Plan 9 bunny stands alone in the cosmic void, AWS data centers on the horizon, looking for a way in. He finds the door. He runs through. Inside is a Tron grid floor and conveyor belts and a hex-crystal hall and a Lambda warp tunnel — and at 2:39 the camera pulls way back and the whole AWS cosmos is revealed populated with millions of cute Miyazaki bunny sprites dancing in unison. The hero bunny is one of them now. This is fine.

Watch BUNNY IN THE CLOUD on YouTube. The engine is open source (GPL-3.0-or-later). The film is Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0).

The brief was a single sentence: "imagine when it's at the peak of the song you are looking at something from a scene from the video game Factorio, but only at a more galactic scale. Plan 9 bunny face is in the middle. Looking around. We are in the AWS cloud." Then it grew. Hayao Miyazaki bunnies running around the cosmos with their fluffy tails. Snoop-Dogg-style autotuned sing-song chants. Eric Prydz arpeggios. Alan Watts oracle voice. Stranger Things cricket chirps. Sayonara, usagi-san. Six passes from baseline to ship.

1. The song: 148 BPM rave/house/techno in A minor

The score is a ChipForge composition with twelve sections across 144 bars (3:53.5): intro, build 1, drop 1, drop 1 ext, breakdown, build 2, drop 2, drop 2 layered, bridge, build 3, climax, outro. A natural minor throughout, with the bridge modulating up a perfect fourth to D minor. Twelve channels: kick, clap, hat, custom RICH_BASS, 6-layer otherworldly_lead, warm-analog + choir pad, shimmer arp, FX, bell + vocal stabs, strings counter-melody, lead2 anthem, signature WOW voice.

The composition is built around two thematic hooks plus a recurring SIGNATURE theme:

HOOK A — Sandstorm-shape eighth-note arpeggio (A4 C5 E5 A5(peak) E5 C5 then A4 D5 F5 A5(peak) F5 D5). Urgent, danceable, the dance-floor formula of climb–peak–descend twice.
HOOK B — Anthem chord-stab quarter notes (A4 C5 E5 A5 ascending, then G4 C5 F5 A5). Slower, hands-in-the-air. Plays its own drop and then layers on top of HOOK A in the layered drop section.
SIGNATURE — An 8-bar melodic theme that ties the whole song together: A4 anchor → climbs to A5 peak → descends G/F/E/D back to A. It plays subtly in the intro (lower octave tease), enters full at drop 1 ext, plays SOLO in the breakdown (the dreamy moment), layers in the layered drop, transposes to D minor in the bridge, then EXPLODES at the climax as a 16th-note arpeggio cycling Am-Dm chord tones — every note is a chord tone, mathematically in tune.

The bass is a custom 6-layer instrument I called RICH_BASS: triangle fundamental + sub-octave sine + saw harmonic edge + perfect-5th sine for organum richness + sine fundamental + compound 12th sine for "Hans Zimmer" depth. All layer attacks ≥ 25 ms — at A2 (~55 Hz, 18 ms period) any attack shorter than a half-cycle creates a DC step that the speaker reproduces as a CLICK. The RICH_BASS attack-time fix was the single biggest tone improvement in the iteration.

The bass walks A2 → G2 → F2 → E2 (descending bassline matching a strings counter-melody) with octave-up jumps on step 10 of every bar — the classic Daft Punk Around the World groove move. This is what makes the bass unconsciously danceable.

Master chain is the standard ChipForge stack: parametric EQ → multiband compressor → transient shaper → sidechain pump → glue compressor → gate → stereo widener (1.22×) → auto-master limiter at -0.3 dB. No tape saturation, no distortion — clean electronic purity, not grunge.

2. The hat groove that took five passes

The first drum pass had the hi-hat playing every 16th note like classic techno. The user feedback: "the 'itz itz' beat feels like forced techno and is annoying." Daft Punk and Illenium use offbeat hats (steps 2/6/10/14) with optional ghost notes on the "& of 2" and "& of 4" — French house groove, not mechanical 16ths. Three styles emerged:

offbeat (verses, builds): just steps 2/6/10/14
drop (drop sections): + ghost notes on 7/15
climax: + extra ghosts on 5/9/13 for max energy

The vocal stabs follow the same chord progression as the bass — Am/G/F/E roots in the upper octave (A4/G4/F4/E4) with fifth answers on step 8 (E5/D5/C5/B4). Daft Punk's signature "ah!" hits land on every chord change.

3. The voice: Daniel as the Plan 9 oracle (Alan Watts)

ElevenLabs voice ID onwK4e9ZLuTAKqWW03F9 (Daniel — deep British wise) routed through the existing bunny_oracle persona in sound/personas.py. The persona description says it all: "Plan 9 the time-travelling bunny from another galaxy: wise, all-knowing, gentle, measured. Speaks rarely and only when it matters. Slower cadence, lots of air." That's Alan Watts in a sentence.

Stability 0.62, similarity boost 0.82, style 0.32, speed 0.88. Light A-minor pentatonic autotune (spit 0.45, blend 0.55, max shift 6 semitones via scripts/autotune_voice.py) — enough musical lock for the Snoop-style sing-song chant flow without sacrificing the philosophical voice quality.

28 short repeating phrases woven through the song. The hero bunny narrating his own journey:

"yo, bunnies in the cloud."
"I see the door."
"in the cloud now. drop it like a packet."
"compute, compute."
"S three. DynamoDB. Lambda."
"we are the bunnies in the wire."
"cross the boundary."
"MILLIONS in the cloud. bunnies running everything."
"every byte my home."
"this is fine."

The voice cutoff bug took two passes to find: ElevenLabs interprets trailing "..." as a long pause and chops the audio mid-word. Strip the ellipsis, replace with a single period, and the voice ends cleanly with the proper consonant. A clean_for_tts() helper now sanitizes every line before generation.

4. The visuals: 12 sections, beat-locked pose snapping

PIL stick figures at 854×480 @ 12 fps, 2898 frames total (3 s intro bookend + 2802 scene + 60 f outro bookend = 4:01.5). Each section gets its own backdrop:

time	section	backdrop
0:03	The Void	bunny alone, AWS data centers on horizon, portal beginning to open
0:29	The Door	portal opens fully, bunny runs toward it
0:42	Inside the Cloud	Tron perspective grid floor in cyan
0:55	Conveyor Belts	Factorio horizontal belts with bunny-dots flowing
1:08	Breakdown	dreamy gradient void, slow drift
1:34	Return	conveyor belts return at growing density
1:47	Anthem	DynamoDB hex grid in cyan/teal
2:00	Layered Euphoria	hex grid + conveyors + bunnies streaming
2:13	Bridge	Lambda warp tunnel — concentric rotating ellipses, purple/magenta
2:26	Build	Tron grid intensifies
2:39	Climax	camera pulls back, MILLIONS of bunnies revealed across the receding grid
3:18	Outro	swarm fades, hero bunny waves goodbye

The hero bunny cycles through ~40 different poses across the song — DANCE_DISCO_R/L, DANCE_HANDS_UP, DANCE_BOX, DANCE_VOGUE, DANCE_EGYPT_R/L, JUMP, CELEBRATE, MIC_DROP, JAZZ_HANDS, THINK, LEAN_BACK, SHRUG, SURPRISE, COVER_FACE, HANDS_UP, POINT_LEFT/RIGHT, WAVE, WALK_A/B. All pose changes snap on song step boundaries (kick beats, snare half-notes, or bar starts depending on section pace) so movement perfectly syncs with the music. The eye and the ear receive the movement event together.

The bunny jumps up on every kick via an ease-out cubic envelope: peak elevation at the kick attack, smoothly returns to neutral over the rest of the beat. Climax bounce is 12 px, drop bounce is 7 px. Eyes scan back and forth (look_dx sweeps ±0.85) with a facing-direction bias (3D-as-2D depth principle — both eyes lead the head turn).

5. The Miyazaki swarm

The user asked for "more details and bunnies in the background. Little sprites animated cutely in different ways like Hayao Miyazaki would imagine, running around the cloud with their fluffy tails." Then: "and dancing." Then: "overwhelm the eyeballs with cuteness and personalities."

Each tiny background bunny is an 8-16 pixel sprite with body + head + ears (filled-pink inside) + fluffy white tail + eye dot. Six mood variants: hop, sit, peek, dance, wave, sleep. Eight fur color variants for variety: cream, lilac, pale yellow, mint, pink-cream, pale blue, apricot, sage.

Population escalates per section to land the climax reveal:

section	bunnies on screen
Intro	3 (peeking from data centers)
Build 1	5 (running toward portal)
Drop 1	24 (hopping on grid)
Drop 1 ext	40 (conveyor belts + dancers)
Breakdown	4 (sitting peacefully — Miyazaki quiet moment)
Build 2	12
Drop 2	36 (dancing on hexes)
Drop 2 layered	60 (crowded dance floor)
Bridge	5 (floating in warp)
Build 3	20 (streaming back)
Climax	200 (overwhelming swarm, all dancing in beat-sync)
Outro	8 → 1 (waving farewell)

Every Miyazaki bunny uses the SAME beat phase as the song (calculated from STEPS_PER_SECOND × frame / FPS), so the entire swarm bounces together. When the kick lands, every visible bunny is at peak elevation simultaneously. That's the cuteness compounder.

6. The modtracker overlay

The top 80 px of every frame is a scrolling modtracker visualization of the song's actual note grid. The scene file imports the chipforge song module directly, calls build_song(), and reads song.patterns[0].grid — a [channel][step] array of NoteEvent | None. Twelve channel columns scroll vertically (18 visible step-rows), with the playhead row highlighted, bar boundaries marked, and each cell's width scaled to note velocity. Channel colors: red kick, orange snare, yellow hat, cyan bass, lime lead, purple pad, green arp, magenta FX, light-blue bell, amber strings, lime lead2, gold signature.

It is note-perfect synced because it's reading the actual song data, not approximating from beat timing. When the SIGNATURE channel's gold cells fill the bottom rows during the climax arpeggio, you can SEE the WOW happening.

7. The bookends: cricket chirp in, Sayonara out

3-second intro bookend: dark void with a constellation of pseudo-random stars, "A NAPKIN FILMS PRODUCTION" tagline fades in (gold), big "BUNNY IN THE CLOUD" title fades up (cream), tiny waving Plan 9 bunny silhouette appears in the last second. Stranger Things cricket alien chirp (007_stranger_things_intro_chirp.wav) plays underneath at -5 dB.

5-second outro bookend: hero bunny fades to black (first second), constellation appears, NAPKIN FILMS card in cream, "A PLAN 9 PRODUCTION" subtitle in gold, "Sayonara, usagi-san" caption in mono (the Japanese goodbye for the Miyazaki connection), pulsing easter-egg sputnik blip top-right (1 kHz callback). Three sequential voice lines via the same Daniel/bunny_oracle persona:

0.10 s — "Sayonara, usagi-san."
1.80 s — "Plan 9, signing off."
3.40 s — "This is fine." (alone, before the fade)
4.30 s — cricket chirp easter egg echo
4.50–5.00 s — afade out

CC BY 4.0 fine print bottom-center. Total composite: 36 frames intro + 2802 frames scene + 60 frames outro = 2898 frames at 12 fps = 4:01.5 exact.

8. Six passes from baseline to ship

The audio took six iterations. The video took six iterations. Each pass addressed specific feedback:

v1 audio: square-wave pad sounded like "a basic Casio keyboard" — replaced deadmau5_square_ambient with formant pads.
v2 audio: granular shimmer + white-noise lead layer + tape sat were "dirty, polluted, hurts ears" — removed all noise sources for clean electronic purity.
v3 audio: hat pattern "itz itz, forced techno, annoying" — switched to offbeat groove.
v4 audio: bass clicks at :07-:08 — built RICH_BASS with attack ≥ 25 ms (sub-cycle attack on low frequency = DC-step click).
v5 audio: dissonance at 2:00 and 3:02 — fixed by realigning HOOK_B bar 1 to Dm chord tones (matching HOOK_A) and switching place_signature_harmony from fixed major thirds to diatonic third lookup in A natural minor (the fixed +4 was producing C# / G# / F# / D#, all out of key).
v6 audio: voice cutoffs from "..." truncation — clean_for_tts() strips ellipses; voices end cleanly.
v1 video: bunny only looking one way; eyes invisible in atmospheric sections.
v2 video: added modtracker, fixed bunny facing alternation, suppressed blink in expression branches that don't render it (engine bug — nervous and contemplative skip the white sclera fill).
v3 video: added 40 dance pose vocabulary, beat-locked pose snapping, kick-shake camera, bigger jump-on-kick.
v4 video: switched voice from macOS say to ElevenLabs bunny_oracle persona (Alan Watts vibe). Added 200-bunny Miyazaki swarm at climax.
v5 video: bookends added — cricket chirp intro + Napkin Films card outro + Sayonara/Plan 9/this-is-fine sequential sign-off.
v6 video: light pools around hero bunny pulsing on each kick, sparkles around hero on celebrations, lens flare on climax bar-1s, eye-bias toward facing direction (3D-as-2D depth), fun synth SFX accents (boop / ding / whoosh / sparkle) at key beats.

Every fix was a tiny code change. The compounding effect is what landed the final.

9. Final sound spec

Runtime:       4:01.5 (241.50 s)
Frames:        2898 at 12 fps
Resolution:    854 × 480
Audio:         AAC stereo at 44.1 kHz
Music:         233.50 s (chipforge groove_lab_full) — A minor, 148 BPM, 144 bars
Voice mix:     233.50 s (28 ElevenLabs bunny_oracle clips, light autotune)
Fun SFX:       233.50 s (boop, ding, whoosh, sparkle accents synthesized inline)
Bookends:      3 s intro (cricket chirp + silence pad)
               5 s outro (sequential sign-offs + chirp echo + afade)
Music chain:   parametric EQ + multiband + transient shape + sidechain
               + glue comp + gate + widener (1.22x) + auto-master at -0.3 dB
Voice chain:   ElevenLabs base + autotune (A penta, spit 0.45, blend 0.55)
Final mix:     intro + main + outro concatenated, hard-cut at 241.5 s

10. New scripts shipped this pass

characters/scenes/bunny_in_the_cloud.py (~1100 lines): scene file with 12 sections, modtracker overlay, Miyazaki sprite renderer, bookend draws, beat-locked pose snapping, light pools, sparkles, lens flare, beat-flash, eye-facing bias.
scripts/bunny_voice.py: ElevenLabs bunny_oracle voice generation pipeline. clean_for_tts() strips trailing ellipses. Light A-minor pentatonic autotune via rubberband.
scripts/bunny_in_the_cloud_finalmix.sh: full audio assembly — generates outro voice clips via speak_as, builds intro/main/outro audio segments, synthesizes fun SFX accents inline, concatenates everything, muxes with the bookended video.
songs/edm/groove_lab_full.py (~1500 lines): the music score. RICH_BASS instrument (5 layers + organum 5th + compound 12th), OTHERWORLDLY_LEAD (6 layers), ANTHEM_LEAD, SIGNATURE_LEAD (7 layers). HOOK_A + HOOK_B + 8-bar SIGNATURE_PHRASE + AM_ARP/DM_ARP for the climax 16th-note arp. Diatonic-third harmony lookup. Twelve sections with their own pose/density/effect profiles.

All under GPL-3.0-or-later in the Napkin Films and ChipForge repos.

Related work

BUNNY IN THE CLOUD sits in the Plan 9 line, same character that anchored PLAN 9 RAP BATTLE (his hardcore-rap debut), THROUGH ME (the EDM-rap meditation in G minor), PLAN 9: EMERGE, AGENT MODE: OG BOBBY JOHNSON, THRONE PROTOCOL, THE INTRUDER (yesterday's AWS Availability Zone battle-rap in D minor), and AWS BRAINROT (last night's Italian-brainrot Plan 9 reading the Solutions Architect syllabus). It is closer in temperament to SATURDAY MACHINE and CANTUS RAVE than to the contemplative line: rave-EDM-forward, dance-floor-anchored, less character monologue than TRANSMISSION or ENCODED.

The biggest production lesson from this pass: the SIGNATURE theme was the unlock. Hook A and Hook B carry the rhythm but they're danceable, not memorable. The signature theme is the "wow" — the recurring melody you'd hum a week later. Plays subtly in the intro (lower octave hint), full statement in drop 1 ext, SOLO in the breakdown (the dreamy moment users will remember), layered in the layered drop, transposed to D minor in the bridge, then explodes as a 16th-note arpeggio at the climax. Six recurrences across the song. The thematic spine.

The bass-attack-click discovery (sub-half-cycle attacks on low-frequency notes produce a DC-step click that the speaker reproduces as audible static) is now codified in the chipforge CLAUDE.md under "Bass click static — sub-cycle attacks are the killer." Future EDM scores get the right defaults from the start.

The Miyazaki swarm pattern (200 tiny sprites bouncing in unified beat phase) carried over to the visual identity. The signature theme + the swarm together are what make the climax read as transcendent — the music says "the cosmos is one giant machine," the visuals say "and the bunnies are what make it run."

License

BUNNY IN THE CLOUD is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Remix it, repost it, drop it into your own thing — credit "Napkin Films / Organic Arts LLC" and link CC BY 4.0. Engine code (Napkin Films, ChipForge) is GPL-3.0-or-later. ElevenLabs voice audio is licensed content and is not redistributed in source form. AWS service names (S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, EC2, etc.) appear under nominative fair use as cultural reference for educational commentary on cloud architecture. The Stranger Things cricket alien chirp synth (007_stranger_things_intro_chirp.wav) was inspired by the recognizable Stranger Things title-card sound design — no audio was sampled. The Daft Punk / Eric Prydz / Sandstorm production languages were studied for spectral analysis only; no audio was sampled, no melody was quoted. The Hayao Miyazaki style influence is in spirit only. Contact: j@organicartsllc.com

On the methodology: This film required six production passes across two repos (Napkin Films + ChipForge) with tight human direction at every stage. If you want to understand how AI-assisted development actually works in practice, versus the "vibe coding" you hear about, read the essay.

Produced with Napkin Films and ChipForge, tools built by Joshua Ayson and AI agents at Organic Arts LLC.