Standing Ovation
Three in the morning in a shut 1,412-seat provincial theatre. A clown performs to an empty house, and by the end every seat holds him, and they are all on their feet.
Uchimawari
内回り, "the inner loop" — one night on a closed railway loop at Shibuya, in sixteen shots and ninety-six seconds. It opens at 00:41 in heavy rain with the city as the only light source, and ends at 04:58 at the same station, on the same lens, lit by the sun.
The Second Sun
A Cretaceous tidal shore 900 km north of Chicxulub, in the 92 seconds where the key light changes source four times and the sea leaves and comes back.
Chaff
Ninety-four seconds inside one man's helmet: a salvage diver swims a derelict orbital grain silo in hard vacuum, hunted by blind acoustic drones, spending twelve rounds of a bolt-driver as his only thruster.
Pastel Astral Dream
A 97-second film: seven islands of confection hang in a starfield over a sea of poured cream, a warm nebula front crosses them, and what melts lifts instead of running down.
Stained Glass Day
One clear September day in a shut 1913 prairie bank, told entirely by the coloured light its one art-glass window drags across the room. 99 s, 18 shots, 24 fps.
First Light
Survive thirty days of polar night at an abandoned arctic weather station until the sun clears the horizon. The stove is the only warm thing for a thousand kilometres, the blizzard is coming, and one polar bear knows where you keep your food.
Sexton's Bell
Ashcombe Vale Cemetery, Kent, October 1887. Ninety-five seconds of night, lit only by lightning and two gas mantles, in which one of eleven waiting-mortuary bells begins to ring.
Updraft
A 96-second cinematic: a cylindrical paper archive 186 m tall burns down in fifteen shots, and the light source, the contents and the scale all invert.
Mother Liquor
A 99-second cinematic tech demo: an empty analytical chemistry lab at three in the morning, filmed inward from the whole room to three millimetres of meniscus, and then down through the surface of the liquid and never back out.
Green Sky
A supercell crosses a salt-flat glider field: the sky turns the green that comes before hail, the pan floods, lightning lights the cloud from inside, and a double rainbow closes it. Two minutes, eighteen set-ups.
Ashbloom
A walled garden at the bottom of a volcanic crater, buried in ash and dead. Rain washes it clean, the plants come back, and for one hour before dawn the crater is lit by nothing but the flowers growing in it. Three minutes, twenty-five shots.
Furrow
Three minutes on a bone-white salt pan at high noon, where something the size of a city block arrives underneath a stranded rig, breaches, arcs two hundred metres through the air and goes back in — leaving a different place behind.
The Emperor's Noon
A marble palace built as a water-driven machine, filmed on the one morning of the year it is started — from a dry basin at dawn to a mirror court at noon.
Carrington Night
Three minutes on an arctic plain: a geomagnetic storm reaches an HVDC converter station, arcs the insulator strings, detonates a transformer and takes the grid out to the horizon — until the only light left is the aurora.
Sengoku Trance
Oda Nobunaga conquers Sengoku Japan by out-raving his enemies. A four-lane psytrance rhythm game in portrait: three rival warlords, three tracks, and a duel you win by breaking the other man's nerve before the track runs out.
Lanternwake
A Victorian gothic horror game in the fen. Raise your lantern and you can read, work and solve — and the Hollow Vicar can see you from across the village. Hood it and you are invisible, and useless. Everything turns on that one dial.
BIG STEAL CAR: ANDREAS-SAN
A third-person crime sandbox compressed into one dead-end Tokyo backstreet: walk Hozumi-dori 3-chome, take a car off the kerb, and see who was watching. Portrait — best on a phone.
Night Mail — Sorting Tower Seven
A factory-automation game about the post. A mile under the city, the night train drops the sacks and you build the cast-iron machine that sorts, stamps and fires every parcel up the right pneumatic tube before the shift ends. You never touch a parcel — you find out where your layout was wrong by watching it jam.
Verdigris Cloister
A turn-based tactics game in a derelict monastery greenhouse at the end of the world. Four gardener-monks hold a living garden against a crystalline Blight that wins by covering the floor rather than by killing you — and between every round, the floor itself grows.
Aisle of Shame
A social-stealth comedy in a supermarket at a quarter to midnight. Your shopping list is nine humiliating things, and the obstacle is not guards — it is everyone who knows you, walking over to say hello.
Nine Bells
A hand-painted 2D climb through a plague city under quarantine. You are the physician; your cane, your censer and your tinctures are the only way up. Nine bells, five patients still breathing, one gate. Nothing in this game is killed.
Slag Saint
A one-fight boss game. You are the Emberward, sent down into a drowned bronze foundry to cool the furnace-god chained in its basin — fifteen metres of scorched bronze with a cathedral bell for a head. Read the wind-up, break its poise, drive the blade into the open core.
EMBERLINE
A 2D pixel-art fighting game set on the last working rail line out of a smog-choked city. Pick a fighter, take four opponents best-of-three, and beat the Warden at the end of the line.