One of my great pleasures: a city on a Sunday morning

One of my great pleasures is walking out into a city on a Sunday morning. The streets are half-empty, the light is soft, and a place that is usually rushing somewhere just… pauses. This Sunday in New York I took that walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and through the Lower East Side, phone in hand.

This is the result: an 85-second film called New York Sunday Morning.

I shot these clips on my iPhone 16 Pro using the standard Camera app and its default video settings (no ProRes, no Apple Log, no special kit), and then edited the whole thing in Claude. No editing software, no timeline, just a conversation.

How it came together

Claude handled every step of the edit from the raw clips on my desktop:

• Colour grade. A warm, soft film look with gently lifted blacks, creamy highlights, and the autumn yellows and greens pushed a little richer.
• Music. Claude wrote the brief for an ElevenLabs track — slow felt piano, warm pads, 75 BPM — generated it in my account, and cut every shot on the beat.
• Titles. A simple serif title over the bridge to open, and “Until next Sunday.” over the final clouds as a flock of birds crosses the frame.
• Sound. The real sound of the bridge and the streets sits under the music, with one continuous bridge ambience so the cuts don’t jump.
• Effects. Where I had no usable sound, Claude generated it: a shovel for the road worker, wind through the autumn leaves, footsteps for the couple walking away.
• Finishing. Letterbox bars for a cinematic look, a version without them, and the title on the very first frame so it works as a thumbnail.

I asked for changes the way I would with an editor (“bring out the greens”, “the tops of the buildings are cropped”) and got a new cut back each time.

It could have been even better

I’m happy with it, but the footage held it back. I shot casually, and the edit had to work around that:

• The iPhone’s default HDR video looked washed out once converted for normal screens, and the first grade came out far too bright. It took a custom conversion to rescue the skies.
• Shots of 2–3 seconds left few places to cut on the beat, and one shot had to go.
• 1080p meant the letterbox bars cropped the tops off skyscrapers and a face on a mural, and every shot had to be reframed by hand.
• The sound was whatever the phone caught: wind thumping on the bridge, nothing usable for the digging or the footsteps. Those effects had to be generated.

What I’ll do next time

A few small changes at the shooting stage would make a big difference in the edit:

1. Shoot Apple Log in HEVC using Apple’s free Final Cut Camera app, which my iPhone 16 Pro already supports. It’s the sweet spot: nearly all the grading room of ProRes, at about a sixth of the file size.
2. Shoot 4K, with space above tall subjects, so I can crop for bars or a vertical version without losing anything.
3. Lock exposure and white balance, so every shot matches.
4. Hold each shot for 6–10 seconds, braced on a railing or a small tripod.
5. Record 20–30 seconds of ambience at each spot, plus close-up sound of anything I want heard, like footsteps, digging or the wind.
6. Try 24 or 25 fps with an ND filter for more film-like motion.

Until next Sunday

The best part is that the walk stays the point. I wander, I shoot what catches my eye, and the edit happens afterwards in a conversation. Next Sunday I’ll take these lessons out with me and see how much further it can go.

If you try something similar in your own city, I’d love to see it.