A 4K film of the James Webb launch

I made a 4K film of the James Webb launch and unfolding. No frame of it came from an AI video or image model. Every frame is computed by code running in a browser. Built with Claude Opus 5.5. Sound on 🔊 How it works The film is a website that plays itself. Each chapter is a React component, a function of time. Remotion opens it in headless Chrome, steps through one frame at a time, and encodes all 2,700 frames at 3840×2160 to MP4. 3D three.js/WebGL: PBR materials, shadows, bloom, depth of field. The telescope is NASA's own JWST model. Opus rigged every mechanism (pallets, tower, mid-booms, 5 sunshield layers, the secondary mirror tripod, both mirror wings) to go from folded to deployed. Effects Liftoff smoke is thousands of lit, depth-sorted particles whose positions are computed from time, so every render is identical. Earth is a custom shader with 8K day, night and cloud maps and an atmosphere that thins with altitude. The HUD and titles are plain HTML, CSS and SVG. Music Also code. An organ, a ticking clock, launch rumble and latch hits, synthesised sample by sample in about 200 lines of JavaScript and mastered with ffmpeg. Original, so no copyright strikes. Real mission data Liftoff 12:20:07 UTC → fairing jettison at 110 km → separation at L+27:07, ~1,400 km over Africa → solar array 69 seconds later → every deployment in the real order, with dates. Opus researched and cited it all before writing a line of code. ~2,800 lines of TypeScript. A 1080p preview renders in ~3 min on a MacBook; the 4K master in ~15. The best part: it's a source file, not a black box. Every camera move, date and color is editable. AI didn't generate the video. It wrote the program that renders it.

OH MY GOD https://t.co/JRqVqgC9E0