Setting 17 scenes and 38 fonts…
Music video2:36Rendered live
A music video presented as plates from an illustrated treatise on the end of the world. Each plate has its own instrument and its own dry joke, one orange spark runs through all of them, and the P(doom) value climbs every time the song ups it. Nothing here was recorded: every frame is a function of the song’s time, drawn in your browser as it plays.
Every frame is a deterministic function of the song’s time. The edit is not a list of hand-typed seconds: each plate’s window is anchored to a lyric line and snapped to the 132 BPM beat grid, so cuts land on downbeats and hits land on kicks and snares. That is also why scrubbing, the hover preview and the plate posters on this page are drawn on demand rather than decoded from a file.
The karaoke is synced word by word. The vocal was separated from the mix with Demucs and a karaoke model, aligned to the lyrics with CTC forced alignment and cross-checked against Whisper; beats, downbeats, sections, drum and vocal onsets and loudness envelopes came from a separate analysis pass. The renderer reads nothing but those two files.
Each plate borrows a different drawing idiom: engraving, oscilloscope, bureaucratic paper, banknote guilloché, blueprint, raymarched 3D, a tree of token probabilities. What holds them together is one palette (ink, bone and a single hazard orange), one type system, one film grain, and the spark: one orange point dragging a line that becomes a loss curve, a price chart, a paperclip and finally a fuse.
three.js is used as a thin layer over WebGL: half-float HDR render targets, hand-written GLSL for the rooms (ray-marched in the original, drawn here as point clouds and wire), GPU batches of anti-aliased capsules for the thousands of hairlines, and Canvas2D text layers kerned glyph by glyph from the fonts’ own tables with opentype.js. A final pass adds bloom, halation, chromatic aberration, a tone shoulder and grain.
The film is the original, collected as it is: its engine and scenes are vendored unchanged apart from where they load their files from, and a few plates drawn differently so that the whole film keeps up with a 120 Hz display. The shoggoth is abstract here, behind its mask and under the askew one: a strange attractor of flowing hairlines, with firing nodes where the original had eyes. The room of What was seen is a point cloud, as if it had been scanned; the paperclip lattice is wire; the whip pans integrate their motion blur by reprojection; and every plate's shaders are compiled in the background before it starts. The NOTICE next to the code lists every change. The player, the plate sheet, the page and the bilingual subtitle band under the picture belong to this lookbook. The subtitles sit outside the frame on purpose: inside it, the lyrics are already the picture.
FIG. 01Sparks
FIG. 02Training loss
FIG. 03Prompt I
FIG. 04Hook I
FIG. 05The room
FIG. 06Shoggoth, masked
FIG. 07Spacetime
FIG. 08Prompt II
FIG. 09Hook II
FIG. 10Ascent (log scale)
FIG. 11Paperwork
FIG. 12Trajectory, revised
FIG. 13Prompt III
FIG. 14Hook III
FIG. 15Paperclips
FIG. 16The fuse
FIG. 17Architecture (recursive)
FIG. 18Scale
FIG. 19Hook IV
FIG. 20Loom
FIG. 21What was seen
The song and its lyrics are not covered by the MIT license; all rights stay with their owners.