/** * Film the engine running, by stepping its clock rather than by recording it. * * node scripts/brand-assets/films.mjs # every film * node scripts/brand-assets/films.mjs --only fidi-day * node scripts/brand-assets/films.mjs --only fidi-day --frames 24 # a rough cut * node scripts/brand-assets/films.mjs --manifest-only # captions only * node scripts/brand-assets/films.mjs --publish films/2026-08-06-abc1234 * * `shots.mjs` next door takes the stills. This takes the moving pictures, and * the two share `harness.mjs` for the same reason they always did. * * ### Why this is not Remotion, or Motion Canvas, or HyperFrames * * All three of those compose an animation *out of code* — React components, * canvas nodes, HTML and GSAP — and they are good at it. None of them can help * here, because the animation already exists: it is a real-time 3D engine with * a sun computed from a clock, and what is missing is not a way to author * motion but a way to *record* motion that is already happening. That is a * frame-stepper and an encoder, which is this file and ffmpeg. * * The distinction is worth holding on to, because the day a title card or a * cross-fade between two of these films is wanted, one of those tools becomes * exactly right — as an editor, downstream of footage this produced. Reaching * for one now would mean reimplementing the city in React. * * ### Why the clock is stepped and not simply left running * * Real-time capture is not available on this box and would be the wrong idea * anyway. A sunset takes an hour, which is not a length of video anybody * watches, and the capture loop screenshots far slower than it renders. So the film is rendered offline the * way films always have been: set the clock, let the frame settle, expose, * advance. The output is smooth 30 fps regardless of what the renderer managed * while it was being photographed. * * Two shims in `filmClock()` make that possible from outside the app, without * a reload per frame — a reload costs fifteen seconds and would put a 180-frame * film at three quarters of an hour. */ import { fileURLToPath } from "node:url"; import { dirname, join, resolve } from "node:path"; import { mkdir, writeFile, rm, access, copyFile } from "node:fs/promises"; import { execFileSync } from "node:child_process"; import { serve, launch, FURNITURE, hide } from "./harness.mjs"; const HERE = dirname(fileURLToPath(import.meta.url)); const ROOT = join(HERE, "..", ".."); // ---- The films -------------------------------------------------------------- const VIEWPORT = { width: 1440, height: 900 }; /** A hero is a band, not a window, so it is framed wider than the figures. */ const HERO_VIEWPORT = { width: 1600, height: 900 }; /** Delivered at 1280 wide. The frames are shot at 1440 and scaled once, by ffmpeg. */ const DELIVER_WIDTH = 1280; const DELIVER_HEIGHT = Math.round((DELIVER_WIDTH * VIEWPORT.height) / VIEWPORT.width); /** * What each film ships as. * * A figure is one file at 1280. The hero ships **two**, because it autoplays * above the fold and a phone at 390 CSS px has no use for a 1440-wide encode — * it is the same picture at two and a half times the bytes, on the connection * least able to spare them. * * The CRFs are measured, not guessed. A time-lapse is close to the worst case * for inter-frame compression: the camera never moves but every pixel changes * every frame as the light does, so the encoder has no static background to * lean on. At CRF 22 the hero came out at 2.5 MB. Behind a scrim that is 38–96% * opaque, CRF 28 is indistinguishable and 987 kB. */ const DELIVERABLES = { figure: [{ suffix: "", width: DELIVER_WIDTH, crf: 22 }], hero: [ { suffix: "", width: 1440, crf: 28 }, { suffix: "-sm", width: 960, crf: 30 }, ], }; const deliverablesFor = (spec) => (spec.chrome === "bare" ? DELIVERABLES.hero : DELIVERABLES.figure); const deliverSize = (spec) => { const vp = spec.viewport ?? VIEWPORT; const w = deliverablesFor(spec)[0].width; return { w, h: Math.round((w * vp.height) / vp.width) }; }; /** * `chapter` and `expect` work exactly as they do in `shots.mjs` — an index into * the chapter list, and the `shortLabel` it is asserted to be. * * `from` and `to` are the ends of the day the camera watches. They are not * midnight to midnight: the hours either side of dawn and dusk are the whole * point and the small hours are eighteen identical dark frames, so the window * is cropped to the part that moves. */ const FILMS = [ { id: "fidi-day", door: "tera", city: "sf", chapter: 3, expect: "FiDi", from: "2026-08-06T04:40:00-07:00", to: "2026-08-06T22:40:00-07:00", frames: 180, fps: 30, title: "Eighteen hours over the Financial District", /** Which frame becomes the poster — the one worth stopping on. */ poster: 0.86, place: "Financial District, San Francisco", caption: "One camera, eighteen hours, six seconds. Nothing here is keyframed: every frame is the engine asked for a different instant, and the light, the shadows, the sky and the window lights all follow from that one number. The clock in the corner is the film captioning itself.", alt: "A time-lapse of the San Francisco financial district seen from above. Shadow sweeps across the towers as the sun crosses the sky, the water changes colour, and after sunset the tower windows light up one by one.", }, { /** * The hero on lumbridgecorp.com, and the only film shot `bare`. * * The figures keep the app's panel because the clock in it is the caption. * A hero has its own headline sitting on top of the picture, and a second * column of interface underneath that headline is not atmosphere, it is * two interfaces arguing. * * The camera is SoMa rather than the whole board, which was tried first: at * that standoff the edge of the terrain plate is visible against the sky * across the top of the frame, and midday is a lot of pale sand. Close in, * the city fills the frame to every edge at every hour. * * It is also the only one that runs **midnight to midnight**. The others * crop to the part of the day that moves; this one cannot, because the page * seeks it to the reader's own local hour and a film that starts at 04:40 * has no frame to show someone at two in the morning. 180 frames across 24 * hours is exactly eight minutes a frame, and the last frame lands at 23:52 * rather than midnight so the loop closes without showing the same minute * twice. */ id: "hero-soma", door: "tera", city: "sf", chapter: 2, expect: "SoMa", from: "2026-08-06T00:00:00-07:00", to: "2026-08-06T23:52:00-07:00", frames: 180, fps: 30, viewport: HERO_VIEWPORT, chrome: "bare", /** Whole-day, so this is the only film where the poster hour is a choice about light. */ poster: 0.33, title: "San Francisco, one whole day", place: "SoMa, San Francisco", caption: "A full day of San Francisco every six seconds, starting at whatever hour it is where you are. The sun, the moon and the window lights are computed from a clock rather than themed — the one claim this engine makes that a picture can settle on its own.", alt: "A time-lapse of downtown San Francisco from above, running through a whole day: dark before dawn, long shadows at sunrise, flat midday light over the tower cluster and the Bay Bridge, then dusk and the windows lighting up one by one.", }, { id: "bay-relief-day", door: "tera", city: "sf", chapter: 0, expect: "Whole Board", from: "2026-08-06T04:40:00-07:00", to: "2026-08-06T22:40:00-07:00", frames: 180, fps: 30, // The region shot is the one where the day does the most work. Shadow // sweeps the length of two mountain ranges, and then the thing the relief // was hiding turns up: the cities, which are somewhere else entirely. title: "A day across the whole board", poster: 0.2, place: "San Francisco Bay Area", caption: "Relief is easiest to read when the light moves. Shadow runs the length of two mountain ranges and back, and then at the end the thing the terrain never told you appears on its own: the cities, which are somewhere else entirely.", alt: "A time-lapse of the whole San Francisco Bay Area from above. Long shadows rake across the hills as the sun crosses, and after dark the built-up ground emerges as scattered clusters of light between the ranges.", }, ]; // ---- Arguments -------------------------------------------------------------- function flag(name, fallback = null) { const i = process.argv.indexOf(`--${name}`); return i > -1 && process.argv[i + 1] && !process.argv[i + 1].startsWith("--") ? process.argv[i + 1] : fallback; } const only = flag("only")?.split(",").map((s) => s.trim()); /** * Override the frame count for a rough cut. * * Filming costs about half a second a frame at 1440x900 on the GPU, so a * 180-frame film is a minute and a half; on the software fallback it is seven * seconds a frame and twenty-two minutes. `--frames 24` is the cheapest * possible way to discover that a camera is pointed at the wrong thing. A rough cut also skips the site, because a 24-frame stutter is not * something to publish by accident. */ const frameOverride = flag("frames") ? Number(flag("frames")) : null; const outRoot = resolve(flag("out", join(ROOT, "films"))); const siteDir = resolve(flag("site", join(ROOT, "..", "lumbridge-v4"))); /** Rewrite the site's manifest from the film list without filming anything. */ const manifestOnly = process.argv.includes("--manifest-only"); /** * Publish an existing render directory to the site instead of shooting a new one. * * There has to be a way to put reels that already exist in front of the site * without re-shooting them — otherwise the answer to "how did those files get * there" becomes `cp`, and a hand-copied artefact is exactly the thing this * pipeline exists to not have. */ const publishFrom = flag("publish"); const wanted = only ? FILMS.filter((f) => only.includes(f.id)) : FILMS; if (only) { const unknown = only.filter((id) => !FILMS.some((f) => f.id === id)); if (unknown.length) { console.error(`unknown film(s): ${unknown.join(", ")}`); process.exit(1); } } const git = (...args) => execFileSync("git", args, { cwd: ROOT, encoding: "utf8" }).trim(); const commit = git("rev-parse", "--short", "HEAD"); const dirty = git("status", "--porcelain").length > 0; const today = new Date().toISOString().slice(0, 10); // ---- The two shims ---------------------------------------------------------- /** * A clock the harness can move, and an app that notices when it does. * * **The skew is a live global, not a constant.** `shots.mjs` bakes one instant * into the page at load, which is right for a still and useless here: 180 * stills would be 180 page loads. Reading `__teraSkew` on every call means the * whole page can be walked through a day without reloading. * * **`setInterval(…, 60_000)` is compressed to 120 ms.** This is the load-bearing * half. `main.ts` recomputes the sun on a once-a-minute wall-clock tick — which * is exactly right for a map somebody is looking at, and means a shifted clock * would otherwise sit unrendered for up to a minute per frame. Only the 60-second * interval is touched, by value, so nothing else in the app has its timing * changed underneath it. * * Both are capture-harness lies told to the page, and neither is shipped: the * deployed bundle has no idea this file exists. */ function filmClock() { return `{ globalThis.__teraSkew = 0; const Real = Date; globalThis.Date = class extends Real { constructor(...a) { super(...(a.length ? a : [Real.now() + globalThis.__teraSkew])); } static now() { return Real.now() + globalThis.__teraSkew; } }; const realSetInterval = globalThis.setInterval.bind(globalThis); globalThis.setInterval = (fn, ms, ...rest) => realSetInterval(fn, ms === 60000 ? 120 : ms, ...rest); }`; } /** Put the page's clock at `instant`, and wait until the frame showing it has been painted. */ async function expose(page, instant) { await page.evaluate((t) => { globalThis.__teraSkew = t - performance.timeOrigin - performance.now(); }, instant); // Long enough for the compressed interval to fire and recompute the sun... await page.waitForTimeout(260); // ...and then two straddled frames, so what is on screen is what we just asked // for rather than the one before it. A `waitForTimeout` alone cannot promise // that when the renderer is slower than the loop asking for frames. await page.evaluate( () => new Promise((r) => requestAnimationFrame(() => requestAnimationFrame(r))), ); } // ---- Filming ---------------------------------------------------------------- async function film(browser, spec, dir) { const host = spec.door === "office" ? "office.lumbridgecorp.com" : "tera.lumbridgecorp.com"; const query = spec.city ? `?city=${spec.city}` : ""; const frames = frameOverride ?? spec.frames; const page = await browser.newPage({ viewport: spec.viewport ?? VIEWPORT, deviceScaleFactor: 1, // As in `shots.mjs`: the chapter cut has to be a cut, not a twenty-second // flight the film would open in the middle of. reducedMotion: "reduce", }); const problems = []; page.on("pageerror", (e) => problems.push(String(e))); try { await page.addInitScript(filmClock()); await page.goto(`http://${host}:5210/${query}`, { waitUntil: "networkidle" }); await page.waitForFunction( () => document.getElementById("boot")?.hidden === true && document.querySelectorAll("#chapters .chapter").length > 0, { timeout: 180_000 }, ); await page.waitForTimeout(4000); const label = await page.evaluate( ({ i, press }) => { const button = [...document.querySelectorAll("#chapters .chapter")][i]; if (!button) return null; if (press) button.click(); return button.textContent.replace(/^\d+/, "").trim(); }, { i: spec.chapter, press: spec.chapter > 0 }, ); if (label !== spec.expect) { throw new Error(`chapter ${spec.chapter} is "${label}", not "${spec.expect}"`); } await page.waitForTimeout(2500); // For a figure the clock stays: it is the caption the film writes for // itself, and the only thing on screen proving the light follows a real // time rather than a hand-keyed fade. A `bare` film is going behind // somebody else's headline and takes all of it off. await hide(page, [ ...FURNITURE.transient, ...(spec.chrome === "bare" ? FURNITURE.BARE : FURNITURE.CLUTTER), ]); const start = new Date(spec.from).getTime(); const end = new Date(spec.to).getTime(); const step = (end - start) / (frames - 1); for (let i = 0; i < frames; i++) { await expose(page, start + step * i); await page.screenshot({ path: join(dir, `f-${String(i).padStart(4, "0")}.png`), timeout: 120_000, animations: "disabled", }); if (i % 20 === 0 || i === frames - 1) { process.stdout.write(`\r frame ${i + 1}/${frames} `); } } process.stdout.write("\n"); if (problems.length) throw new Error(`the page threw while filming: ${problems[0]}`); return frames; } finally { await page.close(); } } /** * Frames to an MP4, plus the poster a `