A creative vibecoding project
Wallonia, a walk film by film
In July 2025 Pablo Fernández Vallejo walked east for thirteen days, from a room in Lille to a chapel in Maastricht, filming along the way. The piece plays every one of those 803 short films in the order they were taken, with their sound, while a map beside them walks the same ground: 249 km on foot, 87 minutes of film out of some 157 hours on the road.
What it is
- The film: every clip back to back, crossfaded, each brought to one sound level. The clock, the day and the kilometres walked roll on between them, so the unfilmed hours are felt rather than shown.
- The map: the walk on the real ground, turned east up because east is where it went. The line burns where it has been walked; towns wake as the walker passes; borders glow when crossed; rivers are named along their course.
- 3D: one tap brings the camera down among the buildings, on real terrain, facing the way the walk goes, an approximate geometry of what each film shows.
- Fragments: on the cover, moments of the walk surface and fade; each one is a door into the film at that moment.
How it was vibecoded
No framework, no build step, no tracker: a static site written entirely by Claude (Anthropic's model, Claude Opus 5.5, working in Claude Code) from Pablo's notes in plain language, over many rounds of "this feels jumpy", "the line jumps over water", "I want to see the hills". Pablo directed; Claude wrote, measured and explained. Some of the decisions that came out of that conversation:
- The walked line trusts the recorded GPS track and doubts the phone's stale position fixes; a turn back is removed only if keeping it would mean walking faster than a person walks.
- Clips with a broken clock take their order from the phone's own file numbering, which never lies about sequence.
- The path is rounded with corner cutting and routed along real streets where nothing was recorded, so it reads like a walk, not a polygon.
- Private places stay private: near the private homes slept in along the way, the line simply is not drawn.
- Every claim about smoothness or speed was measured, not eyeballed: frame times on a slowed processor, map views compared pixel by pixel, a headless browser that walks the whole piece on a computer and a phone before each release.
Under the hood
MapLibre GL draws the map from Protomaps vector tiles (OpenStreetMap data) packed as PMTiles and cut to the walk's corridor; the 3D terrain comes from Mapterhorn's open elevation data; untracked stretches follow the streets via the OpenStreetMap walking router; ffmpeg measured the loudness of every clip. Everything is served as static files from GitHub Pages under a strict content security policy: no cookies, no analytics, nothing loaded from anywhere else.
In numbers
- 13
- days
- 249 km
- on foot
- 803
- films
- 3
- countries: France, Belgium, the Netherlands