I built a time machine last weekend. It only goes to ten moments in history.

It’s called iconic.photos, and it’s basically ten famous photos you can step inside. Time is frozen while the camera moves through the scene. The clips are AI-generated, obviously.

The trick

Last week I saw a video on LinkedIn that flies through Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and lands back on the painting. I kept thinking about it. Would that actually work with a photo?

So on Friday morning I opened Claude Code in Conductor (same setup as in I shouldn’t be able to do this) and tried.

I give the video model, ByteDance’s Seedance 2.5, the same photo as its first and last frame. The camera can go wherever it wants in between, but it has to come back to the photo. That’s basically why every clip loops.

What the AI got wrong

Behind the ironworkers eating lunch on a beam, it put the Chrysler Building where Central Park should be.

On Abbey Road, it moved Paul McCartney’s cigarette from his hand to between his toes.

It whispered “hi” into the audio of the Moon landing.

When the camera rose over the Berlin Wall, it invented the East side.

A thin scratch on the Berlin photo grew into a stick coming out of a man’s head.

And I told it the flag on Iwo Jima “never ripples, flaps or unfurls”. It flapped in all six takes.

This all makes sense, because these models basically predict what’s most likely to be there. The Chrysler Building fits any Manhattan skyline. Here it just ended up in the wrong place. (I wrote about this in June: a good prediction isn’t a good decision.)

One rule

So I made one rule: never show what the photo doesn’t.

That’s essentially where most of the work went: deciding which parts of each scene are off-limits to the camera. In Berlin it stays at head height inside the crowd, so the Wall hides the East for me. On the Moon it circles Buzz Aldrin and finds Neil Armstrong, who actually took the photo. He’s in it too, reflected in Aldrin’s visor. There are only a few photos of Armstrong on the Moon, because he had the camera most of the time.

13 years in design, and it’s still the same job: deciding what to leave out.

The filter

Seedance also has a filter, and it has opinions.

Marilyn Monroe and Martin Luther King Jr. got blocked every time for “copyright restrictions”. The Tank Man photo is censored in China, but it went through fine on a model made by ByteDance, a Chinese company. And a 2013 protest photo from Sofia got refused as “sensitive” on Replicate, but the exact same model rendered it on OpenRouter.

Why I built it

I wanted to see these moments from the inside. I had a smile on my face the whole weekend, even though this was never gonna make me a cent.

In April I wrote that I’d spend six months building things just for the fun of it. This was actually the most fun I’ve had building in a while.