A river through the Studio

The Studio is the private side of this site, where a day out becomes a Field Note. It deserved a front door that felt like a workshop, so its header became a glowing river running through a crack in an old workbench, with a brass STUDIO panel bolted on above it.

Green, then blue

It began green, from rendered 4K footage. Then I wanted a blue river, and the best I could render was 1080p. That turned out fine: the header is a short, wide strip, so 1920 pixels across is all it ever needs. The first version jumped when you switched. Every change now plays its own clip and crossfades in, and the buttons wait until it's done.

Two small toggles

The controls took the longest. I tried handwheels, then bypass valves with lit windows, then valves down in the footer, then lamps beside them. It was all too much. What stuck is the smallest version: two little toggles on the panel, each between jewel pilot lamps. DAY/NIGHT plays dusk or dawn. CHANGE LIQUID only goes one way round, blue to green to orange and back to blue, so every change has exactly one clip.

That one-way rule is what made it buildable. Three liquids, day and night, each with a loop, a dusk and dawn, and a change to the next liquid: 18 clips for the river and 18 more for the glowing pipe in the footer. With each one in a few sizes for different screens, that's 124 video files behind one header.

That one-way rule is what made it buildable.

One light model

The renders never quite agreed with each other. A glass tube on the river bank was lit in one clip and dark in the next, and a new render would arrive with the lamps glowing green when the loop it hands over to has them orange. So every clip goes through the same light model before it's used. The tube's glow is measured once from the blue night footage, then painted back in the colour of the liquid, scaled by how dark the scene is. Both ends of each change are graded to match the loops they meet, so the hand-offs don't show.

The liquid spreads

Then the liquid started spreading. The rivets in the brass rails fill with its colour. The page itself shifts: gold on walnut for orange, steel on slate for blue, verdigris on bronze for green. The STUDIO letters fill with it too, a slow wave running through them, borrowed from an old CSS trick for text filling with water. On every change they drain and fill again.

Even the links remember. The address carries the look, so a link shared at night with the orange liquid opens that way, and its preview card shows it.

What I learned: less is more, again. The valves were fun to build and wrong to keep. And it only feels like one machine when the light agrees everywhere, so measure the light once and paint it back the same way in every clip.