You ought to meet and discuss your project with Arnaud Hervas, the original author of the Shake compositing software. Shake was a VFX industry compositor that used GCC C++ as the "scripting language" that non-developers wrote. It was not exposed as C, but macro modified to look simpler. Arnaud did several industry firsts, including using the GPU to render compositing layers back when all that type of work was in software. His company before Apple bought them was called Nothing Real, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Real He's a nice guy, so don't be intimidated.
