A second chess lesson film, and v4 that would not stay remembered

Blog post #86

My first chess lesson plan for children had a film and a PDF. This week I wanted the same for lesson two. I asked Claude Code for ideas, picked one, and ended up with a 2 minute 52 second English film made in HyperFrames, a four-page trainer PDF, and a long detour about which voice model it should use.

The film is public on my channel, now called Superintelligence, Explored, in the same playlist as lesson one. The PDF is a free download on Aelg’s website.

🎥 Prefer video? Watch the second chess lesson on YouTube. The free trainer PDF is linked in the description.

What shipped

  • A lesson plan for coaches, teachers and parents. One idea: bring the knights and bishops into the game early. You play ten moves on a demonstration board, stop, and let the children count who is better. Then comes the middle of the board, three opening rules and a points game where each child counts their own development.
  • An English film. 11 scenes, animated boards with pieces that move, arrows, a point table that builds up, and every scene timed to the exact words of the narration. The voice is my clone on ElevenLabs v4.
  • A four-page PDF. The same plan with diagrams, the point table, a worked example from the demonstration game and a checklist for the children. I built it as a printable web page and printed it to PDF.
  • Subtitles and chapters for the YouTube page.

What’s working

  • Counting as the teaching tool. The question is not “what is a good opening”, it is “how many pieces are out?”. The points game gives the children a result they can check themselves.
  • Timing graphics to the words. The voice service returns the position of every character, so I could place each graphic on the word that says it without running a separate speech recogniser.
  • A and B sounded the same. I generated the full narration twice on v4, once with the settings Codex had used for an earlier test and once with none. I could not hear a difference, so I kept none.

What’s unclear or broken

  • Subtitles did not upload. My YouTube login lacks the permission to add captions through the API. The file is ready and I add it by hand in YouTube Studio.
  • The first narration was for the wrong audience. It spoke to the children (“say it out loud with me”). The film is for adults who teach children, so it was rewritten.
  • The demonstration game was not legal chess. The script said Black moves only edge pawns and brings the queen out early. That cannot happen, because the queen needs a centre pawn to move first. The line was changed to one that can be played, 1. e4 e6 2. Nf3 Qf6 and so on, and the voice was generated again.
  • [excited] may be too much for chess. It makes the voice very energetic. Plenty of energy is still good, so I have not decided.

Decisions made

  • Adults are the audience. Not the children, and not the people who were in the lesson. The film presents the plan as a suggestion and hands out the PDF.
  • No background music. The music catalogue in HyperFrames needs a HeyGen account, and I have dropped that skill.
  • Keep the film private until the link works. A public film with a dead link in the description is worse than waiting, so it went public only after the PDF downloaded.

Tooling & process

  • Claude Code did not know v4 existed. ElevenLabs released it on 28 September, after the model’s training. It suggested v3 with a stability setting, and I said it was wrong. I have saved v4 in memory several times, but memory in Claude Code belongs to a project folder. I make films from many folders, so the note sat where it was not needed. The rule now lives in my global instructions file, which every folder reads.
  • Skills have their own defaults, and they overwrite your edits. The media skill in HyperFrames defaulted to a different voice and to v2. I patched it to v4. Then the HyperFrames setup command refreshed the skills and the patch was gone, in all three places it is installed. The setting that stops this is HYPERFRAMES_SKIP_SKILLS=1, and I used it for the rest of the build.
  • I removed the HeyGen skill and kept HyperFrames. Written down so the next session does not suggest it.
  • Two sources said different things. My Codex notes already said “use v4 for both languages”, while the film scripts and several memory files in other folders said v3 and v2. The fix was to search every skill, memory and script for the old model names and see which ones were just history.
  • Publishing to my own site is two steps. Merge the PDF in GitHub, then deploy the site from where it is hosted. Claude Code had assumed the first would do the second, and the link returned a 404 until I deployed the site myself.

— Stefan