A hundred-second clown-horror tech demo. Merriweather Hall was built by a clown, and the joke is that the clown never left — because the clown is the building.
Nothing enters the frame. No figure, no monster, no jump. Over fourteen shots the room composes itself into a face aimed at the camera: the proscenium becomes a mouth, two clerestory windows become eyes, the chandelier hangs between them as a nose. Shot 6 and shot 14 are the same camera station to the millimetre — a ruined ballroom, then a face. Nothing entered and nothing left; the architecture moved.
Run it
execute { instance: "<this world>", file: "/source/demo/play.luau" }
play.luau rebinds every slice, returns each to its shot-one state, and hands the clock to the cutscene demo.film. Nothing in the demo reads wall-clock time or an unseeded random, so two takes are the same hundred seconds.
What is in here
/source/demo/hall— the whole place, ~2100 entities: the grin-gate, the facade, the entry hall, the two-storey ballroom with its 176-square checkerboard, the proscenium built as 23 parametric wall slices that widen into a grin, two clerestory eyes with slat lids, the mirror corridor, the dressing room./source/demo/props— dust sheets breathing out of phase, a music box whose ballerina is a clown and whose tune stops mid-phrase, a bulb-lined dressing mirror that fails one bulb at a time, 200 porcelain masks that turn to face the lens, an animatronic band waking up, and a twelve-arm chandelier that falls 10.9 m under real gravity and throws 96 crystal shards./source/demo/air— the storm, four lightning strikes, rain that gets inside from shot 6, volumetric shafts raymarched inside bounding proxies, moths, and the wetness ramp that turns the floor into a mirror./source/demo/look— 31 lights on one curve, a moonless procedural sky, a lens (grain, anamorphic streak, DoF racked per shot, motion blur) and a post chain graded through a 32-entry colour cube built from the palette./source/demo/film+/source/demo/stagecraft— the 14 shots as 17 camera moves, the schedule the architecture assembles on, and a ten-source diegetic mix: rain on slate, four thunder hits, a detuned music box, and a calliope so reverberant it reads as plumbing, which is the last thing left in the film after the light has gone.
The look
Near-monochrome bruised violet and greasepaint bone, with cadmium red and sick chrome yellow used as rare saturated hits. Lit from outside in Act I, by failing practicals in Act II, and in Act III only by a warm glow behind two round windows that have no light source in them.
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