Light Left On

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length

4:07

look

pixel art when the world was a screen in a dark room, paint when the stories opened up

covers

primary school to National Service, 1989 to 1998

I was born in 1977. Both my parents worked, and my grandmother was the one at home. When growing up felt heavy, I went into fantasy paperbacks and PC role-playing games. I could stay inside one story, or one game, for hours. My grades paid for it, and I turned out fine.

AI sang it and drew some of it. The story is mine, and my grandmother is never shown. She is only the soup, the plate and the light.

• after school

  Two keys on the hook and nobody home. Soup on the stove, a fish under a cover.

  Both my parents worked, so the flat was often empty. My grandmother was there, and she left home-cooked soup and fish for me.

• weekends

  I worked my weekend for a paperback, Dungeons & Dragons, paid for with my own money.

  I did part-time jobs to buy my own books and games. The D&D paperbacks came from a bookshop.

• the chorus

  I was somewhere else till morning, and the light stayed on for me.

  I could read or play for hours and lose track of time. Someone always left a light on.

• the games

  They called me the Avatar there, and I had a name to be.

  The Ultima games, where you play the Avatar.

• 1990–93

  A four eight six humming on the table, floppies clicking, copied disks and all. And later the CD-ROM tray sliding out, a drawer full of other worlds.

  Pasir Ris Secondary. An Intel 486 PC with floppy disks, later a CD-ROM drive, and games copied from friends.

• the same years

  Porridge going cold beside the keyboard, frog and fish she left without a word.

  Porridge, fish and frog meat, put down without a question about where I had been.

• report cards

  The report card sat face-down on the table. The marks came back the way marks do. I let them.

  My grades slipped while I was inside those worlds, and I let them.

• 1994–95

  No uniform at Thames, a bus ride into town, a different kind of alone. I wasn’t running into the stories anymore. I was choosing them.

  Private A Levels at Thames Business School. By then I picked the stories on purpose.

• 1996–98

  Boots and a bunk and a world I couldn’t log out of. So I sat in the guardhouse, quiet, with the fantasy novel open.

  National Service. In the guardhouse I read my fantasy novel, and the camp went far away.

• the end

  Those worlds kept me whole. I turned out fine.

  The books and games were what kept me steady.

• 1 · words

  I told Claude the years, the places and the small details. It asked questions until each line pointed at something real, then drafted the lyrics. I changed what didn’t sound like me.

• 2 · first take

  I tried the song first on my own Mac with ACE-Step 1.5, an open model that sings. That draft helped me hear the feel. The version you hear was made in ChatCut.

• 3 · look

  Verses are pixel art drawn in code, so nothing is copied from a game. Choruses are painted. I made eight painted scenes with Qwen-Image 2.1 on my Mac and threw away the ones that looked like a European town, not Singapore.

• 4 · motion

  Five short clips from Wan 2.7 in OpenArt bring the book, the ridge, the empty bus seat, the road and the morning hall to life. I used credits that were about to expire, and checked every clip for watermarks, new people and faces.

• 5 · checks

  A second AI looked at the frames against a quality bar I had approved. A third checked the timing against the words. They caught real problems, like a door that looked pasted on.

• 6 · a mistake

  One scene was painted over every scene before it. The checks missed it for three rounds, because they only looked at the frames they were asked about. I found it by looking at what played just before each scene.

the words

Claude: asked questions and drafted the lyrics from my memories

the draft

ACE-Step 1.5: on-device song, to hear the feel

the song

ChatCut, with Mureka: music and voice, AI-generated

the pictures

Qwen-Image 2.1 on my Mac, plus pixel art drawn in code

the motion

Wan 2.7, made in OpenArt

the video

HyperFrames, built with Claude Code