Sexton's Bell

A 95-second cinematic tech demo. Fourteen shots, 24 fps, 2280 frames, all of it a pure function of one film clock.

The film

A private garden cemetery sunk in a chalk vale: an avenue of Irish yews, four hundred monuments, and at the bottom of it a ragstone mortuary chapel with a 34 m broach spire. Attached to the chapel is the waiting mortuary — the Victorian safeguard against premature burial. Eleven bodies lie on cast-iron biers; a cord runs from each one's finger, up over a rail, to its own brass bell.

A thunderstorm crosses the vale while the sexton walks his round. As it closes, one of the eleven bells begins to ring. The storm takes the spire at its nearest point and every light in the building dies. In the dark that follows, bier seven is empty, its cord is cut, and its bell is still swinging.

The storm is the light source and the film's clock. Between strokes there is almost nothing to see. The film counts flash-to-thunder the whole way down — 9.01 s, 8.19, 6.41, 5.10, 3.62, 2.20, 1.10, 0.40, then 0.00 at the strike — and back out to 7.90 as the cell leaves. Nothing in the score is ever synchronised to a flash; everything is late by d/343.

What it is made of

Five slices, each a pure update(t), so any frame can be painted exactly by seeking to it:

• vale — the chalk vale, a 30-tree yew avenue, 400 procedural monuments, and the chapel exterior: coursed ragstone, clasping buttresses, two-centred traceried openings with real reveals, and a 22-course broach spire.
• vigil — the waiting mortuary: a two-centred barrel vault on nine ribs, an encaustic floor, a traceried east window, and the hero mechanism — eleven biers, eleven sheeted bodies with articulated index fingers, eleven brass bells on their own pivots, and eleven hemp cords.
• storm — fifteen GPU particle systems, three rain depths, a drifting cloud deck lit from inside by the strobe, and lightning channels built as noise polylines drawn as cross-ribbons, restriking at 22 Hz.
• look — the whole rig on one strobe envelope: a directional key that is the stroke, an ambient floor that renders wet ragstone at exactly near-black, gas and paraffin practicals that die at 58.40, three act LUTs, and a fourteen-entry print-density table because a night film is printed shot by shot.
• lens — fourteen stations, the cut, the focus racks, and a soundtrack of 29 synthesized clips: nine sustained score voices, five beds, and 76 one-shots on the film's clock.

Watching it

local d = entity.find("Film").component.get("FilmDirector")
d:run()        -- play 0 → 95 s
d:seek(58.4)   -- paint the strike, exactly
d:status()     -- t, frame, shot, stroke, strobe, rain, wind, gas