Deep Time

The best parts

• One unbroken camera move from loose grit at the surface to a single seed at the bottom
• The seams are adjacent frames of one render, so the descent never visibly cuts
• Portrait and landscape come from the same film, every focal point kept centre-safe
• Served from Cloudflare’s edge as a Worker

How it came together

A single continuous descent through rock. The page is a core sample: you scroll down through grit, compaction, shale and ice, and the only living thing is at the bottom.

1. The problem

   Most scrolling sites move things around the screen. I wanted to see whether a scroll could carry one idea the whole way down instead of decorating five separate sections.

2. The approach

   Treat the page as a core sample and the scroll as a descent. Five chapters, one continuous camera move, and a payoff at the bottom you can only reach by passing through the quiet part.

3. How it’s built

   TanStack Start on Vite, deployed as a Cloudflare Worker, with Tailwind for layout. The film is one continuous render cut into five segments aligned to the chapter beats, so the seams are adjacent frames rather than separate clips that have to be matched.

4. What shipped

   A five-chapter descent that plays as one shot, with a locked palette and every focal point inside the centre-safe area — so portrait is a lighter re-encode of the same source rather than a second film.

5. What I took from it

   Committing to one idea early made every later decision easier. Once the page was a core sample, questions like “should this section have a card?” answered themselves.