course of empire

A one-page website that tells Thomas Cole's "The Course of Empire" (1833–36, public domain) as one continuous scroll film. Behind a preloader that counts up under "The Course of Empire" and draws its frame into the Enter button, a real three.js museum hall opens from the middle in spreading blots: marble floor, plaster walls, columns, busts in niches, fog on the floor, a rope, and The Consummation of Empire in a gilded frame. Scrolling flies the camera low across the hall and over the rope, straight on into the painting, which comes alive: the film's first frames are laid over the canvas exactly where they belong, so the picture never cuts to another, it starts to move. The film (packed WebP frame sequences, 1080p or 720p, decoded just ahead of the scroll) runs through the triumph at noon, the conqueror on his elephant, the storm and the headless guardian, the flood and the last column under the moon, with titles and paragraphs set to film frames. It pulls back out of Desolation into the same hall now in ruins ("Every empire believes it is the exception."), offers "Watch again", and rebuilds the hall so the page is a circle. A painting card and a chapter rail open the original canvases with their history, three ambient loops cross-fade along the timeline, the cursor turns into the museum's "Please do not touch!" over the painting, seven quality levels fit the hall to the machine (?q=0 for full quality), and phones, phones held sideways and tablets have their own layouts.