The brief
Four short concept films, each selling a different kind of motion work. There is a software launch, a brand reveal, a title sequence and a character origin story. A buyer should be able to watch each one as a normal film, and also open it as a web page and watch the same film run live. So every film is a web page first, and the MP4 is rendered from that page.
None of them is client work. Plumbline and Quoin are made-up brands and are labelled concept on screen. Kinetic and Origin are about us.
What we made
- Plumbline, a 30 second launch film for a made-up planning app. 900 frames, 4K master
- Quoin, a 30 second identity reveal for a made-up brand. 900 frames, 1080p master
- Kinetic title sequence, 30 seconds, four alphabets drawn in code with no font files. 900 frames, 4K master
- Origin, 54.6 seconds, GiveMePrompts as a paint-blob character that is born, faceplants, then levels up. 1,637 frames, 4K master
- All four at 30 fps with sound, plus a live page for each on our site
How it works
Each film is an HTML page that runs on one clock. A seek function draws any moment on demand, so the same file plays live in a browser and renders the master one frame at a time through a headless browser.
The music is cut first and run through a beat tracker. It writes the beats, bars, kicks and snares into a file the film reads, so cards and cuts land on measured hits.
Each film builds its own look from scratch. Plumbline is HTML, CSS and SVG in CSS 3D, and every number on screen is labelled sample data. Quoin's mark is geometry, four quarter-discs holding a coin whose size is derived from them, not picked by eye. Kinetic draws four alphabets (bars and rings, a pen with pressure, Bezier points, pixel cells and cubes), and the readouts on screen are live numbers from the render. Origin paints with a bristle brush engine and a WebGL paint and bloom pass.
For Plumbline's 4K master, each frame is captured four times inside a 180 degree shutter and averaged in linear light, so motion blur behaves like a real camera's. Fast frames get more samples, up to 32.
What we threw away
Plumbline's first full render was thrown out. The motion blur was undersampled, so fast moves showed stepped ghost copies instead of a blur, worst at 3.3 and 21.4 seconds. The fix was the adaptive sample count above. The last still on this page shows the same moment before and after.
The first 4K encode piped raw frames straight into the encoder and ran out of memory. Frames now go to disk as a PNG sequence first, and the encode is a separate step. A real payment brand name had also slipped into Plumbline's sample data, and we swapped it for a generic one.
Kinetic's first final was rendered before the last code edits, so we re-recorded the whole film from the final source. A culling bug was also drawing the cube letters with the wrong sides showing, and that was fixed and checked on new frames. Origin shipped from its fifth build.
Limits
All four are concept work. Plumbline and Quoin are made-up brands, Kinetic and Origin use our own name, and nothing on screen is a real result.
The small interface and readout text, about 11 to 13 px, reads as texture on a phone. Plumbline is CSS 3D, not real 3D, so it has no true depth of field. Kinetic's soundtrack is a cut of an existing instrumental, not scored to the edit, so the hits only roughly line up in the middle. Up close, Origin's hero looks more like a sticker than oil paint, and its low point is about five seconds of mostly black on purpose. Quoin's master is 1080p, not 4K.
