4,025 frames
4,025 frames
A WebGL engine renders light in high dynamic range, stepped one frame at a time in headless Chromium. The film was rendered in 17 pieces, side by side.
Two stars, one theft.
Two stars circle each other in the dark. Goliath is a red giant, a boiling mass of crimson gas with convection cells the size of suns. David is a white dwarf: no bigger than Earth, far denser, a cold blue-white point.
The giant has swollen until its outer layers reach the balance point between the two. Past it, the dwarf's gravity wins. Gas tears loose in a stream of fire and curves across the gap.
It spirals into a vortex around the dwarf and settles on its surface as an ocean of hydrogen, packed hotter and tighter with every turn.
Five strikes land in the orchestra. Each one takes light from the picture, until the whole image is drawn inward to a single point.
Then the ocean ignites, and you see nothing. The screen is black and the climax is a sound. When the eruption breaks out of the dark, the explosion lands on that frame and Vivaldi's closing tutti returns under cannon salvos.
The shell fractures into gold. The giant is left scarred, undone by its own substance. The small core endures, as the white dwarf of a real nova does. A king is crowned.
From a dark-sky Earth, a point of light appears where there was none. And the marble David, who has been turning toward the lens all film, looks straight at you.
