Curious, interesting and beautifully done. Congratulations for having found and create this "funky-chicken method method of creating numbers" (as you have said) with this rectangular boxes.
Like it much and also the clever way you have built it, and also having it as a snippet to continue building around it as it can have different variations and uses with some added components.
This would be good also to fill the rectangles with different source images

or fill the black part with a image background, or use the results of other FF filters as overlay for this numbers.
some fast example of filling the background