Kākāpō Party

Simon Willison presented a closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America. For his closing slide, he created a pixel art animation of kākāpō parrots jumping up and down at a party with confetti.

Willison said he had seen buzz about how good Claude Opus 5.5 was at creating pixel art animations. He gathered three kākāpō photos from Google image search and gave them to Claude with a prompt asking for an animated pixel art animation on an HTML5 canvas, featuring at least 20 kākāpō having a party with confetti.

He described the resulting page as "pretty great." To embed it in a Keynote presentation file, he downloaded the HTML and instructed a local Claude Code session to make a video of the local file, loading it in a browser and clicking a few times to trigger the confetti effect. The video was to be 15 seconds long, with clicking not starting until 3 seconds in and several clicks spread around the clickable area.

Claude Code used Playwright to produce the video, which Willison said was exactly what he needed for his final slide. The Playwright script launched Chromium with a 1280x720 viewport and recorded video, navigated to the local HTML file, and performed ten clicks at coordinates distributed across corners, edges and centre between 3.0 and 13.2 seconds, closing after roughly 16 seconds.

Willison shared the prompt transcript, the resulting page, the video, the Playwright transcript and the full script.