A living record of work in progress: decisions, revisions and traces of what changed.
25 SEP 2026BELGRADE / UTC+2STATUS / PUBLISHED
FIELD NOTE / GAME
The night the game read from the calendar
Yesterday's highway always drove into the sunset. Today it learned the date: the road runs through the Middle Urals, and 22:00 is now checked against the real sun. At the end of September, that is already night.
BEFORE → AFTER · 24.09 / 25.09same shots · straight, left, right · in progress
The film is before and after on the same shots: straight, turning left, turning right. The cabin was rebuilt from the inside — gauges under a hood, a radio between the vents, a door, wipers. The hands no longer pass through the wheel: each one holds the rim, with a gap around its section.
The forest is Ural now: tiered spruce, pine, birch and larch that turn gold at the end of August and are bare by November, with snow until April. Fog settles in the hollows and the headlights catch it. Sometimes an elk or a roe deer steps onto the road, and may stop in the light.
Below are all fifty-five renders of the day in order, the failed ones included: headlights that did not reach the asphalt, and a debug frame with their light multiplied thirty times.
REEL / RENDER LOG, BEFORE AND AFTER, SEASONS
RENDER LOG / 55 FRAMESBEFORE / STRAIGHTAFTER / STRAIGHTBEFORE / STEERINGAFTER / STEERINGGRIP / CLOSE-UPGRIP / IN THE TURNGAUGESELK / DRIVER'S SEATELK / CHASE CAMERAFOG BANKROE DEER IN FOGFOG / JULY 10JUNE 21 / SUNSETMAY 20 / YOUNG LEAVESAUGUST 10 / DUSKJANUARY 15 / SNOWWINTER / CHASE CAMERADEBUG / LOW BEAM ×30PHONE / PORTRAITPHONE / MENU
The hands passed through the wheel: the palm and fingers were boxes laid across the rim, and the lower half of the wheel was buried in the dashboard. Now each hand is built around the rim, and the dashboard has moved back.
A spotlight for headlights barely lit the asphalt: from that height the light lands almost edge-on. The low-beam pool is now computed in the road shader.
The top of the rim hid the speed readout. The clock moved to the top of the cluster, the speed lower.
Snow in the headlights burned out into a white patch. Light surfaces no longer blow out.
Fog layers at eye height read as a thin line. They now lie closer to the ground.
FIELD NOTE / GAME
A day spent driving into a sunset that never sets
The studio's first game went out today. HIGHWAY 22:00 is an endless highway on a summer evening, seen from behind a low-poly wheel. Then an autopilot drove it for ten minutes to see what would break.
TIMELAPSE · 10 MIN → 20 S600 frames · one per second · in progress
The timelapse is those ten minutes: the autopilot holds the lane, changes lanes and overtakes once, flicks through the radio, runs onto the shoulder and slows almost to a standstill once, while the camera leaves the car now and then. About nineteen kilometres, one frame a second.
The road is straight. The bends and the hills are a trick of the vertex shader, and the sun is pinned to wherever the road meets the horizon, so the drive always heads into it. The radio writes its own lo-fi rock and hip-hop as you go — nothing is streamed.
REEL / TUNING LOG AND STOP-MOTION
TUNING LOG / 10 STAGESHANDS ON THE WHEELOVERTAKE / CHASEONCOMING / SIDEBUMP / CHASESHOULDER / FROM ABOVERADIO / CLOSE-UPORBITLOW / ASPHALTFRONT / EVENING SKY
On the hills the road sank under the slope: the asphalt bent in hundred-metre pieces while the ground bent every ten. Now the asphalt bends every five metres. The ten-minute drive caught this one.
Trees left behind kept their buffers on the graphics card. They are released now.
Slow cars held your lane and never moved over. Now they move over when you come up behind.
On a short phone screen the start button fell off the bottom. The panel scrolls now, and the key list is hidden on touch.
On project cards a long label ran into the text. The column is wider now.
FIELD NOTE
A day spent looking through glass that doesn't exist yet
Everything in today's frame was shot through a lens we're still building — software that behaves like real glass rather than a filter laid on top, with its own way of bending light, dropping colour at the edges and folding the world into a circle. We won't say much about it yet; it isn't finished, and when it is, it will have its own page. First the панелька; the optics can wait their turn.
LOOP · ~5s · BLENDER28 frames · shot through Les.Lens · in progress
For now, only what it sees. The camera falls into a slow rotation above a low tangle of foliage, deep red-brown, until the garden reads more like weather. The frame closes in like an iris, motion smears one turn into the next, and a thin seam of colour bleeds where the light runs out. Particles drift through — dust, or something with wings.
The swirl, the circular falloff and the fringing at the edges are all the lens, not post. Still in progress — some days the work only wants to move.
A day spent building a lens before pointing it at anything
Behind that frame is a stretch at the optical bench — writing a virtual lens and camera from the glass outward, then breaking each part on purpose to see whether it behaves. None of it is a picture; all of it is a measurement.
The optics came first: light bent through modelled glass, a real image circle falling short of the sensor with its rim going blue where colour separates, distortion pushed from nothing to barrel to pincushion and checked twice — once on the processor, once on the card — to be sure they agree. Then the out-of-focus, where a lens shows its manners: aperture and cat-eye at the edges, focus pulled from a metre to a kilometre, and a Helios — the old swirl — rebuilt as a multi-element character rather than a filter, so the background turns instead of just smearing.
Behind the glass, everything the sensor does with the light: a colour-filter mosaic and the demosaic that guesses it back, an ISO ramp carrying its own noise, a colour matrix, white balance leaning from daylight to tungsten, a shutter that can roll or hold, and the small honest faults — dust, hot pixels, fixed-pattern grain. All of it measured against checkerboards, slanted edges and flat fields, and wired into a panel inside Blender where the knobs move the look live.
This is the quiet infrastructure under the frame above. The proper release will be its own thing, later. For now, the bench — work in progress.
The frame is a панелька seen through weather — nine storeys of concrete going soft under snow, a handful of windows still warm against the cold. It began as a single painted still and became a loop inside a small ComfyUI graph: an image coaxed into motion, roughly thirty seconds at twelve frames a second, framed vertical.
LOOP · 30s · COMFYUIvertical · 12fps · in progress
Snow works in two registers at once. Fine particles drift across the lens in the foreground, while heavier, painterly banks build up below — impasto rather than photographic grain, the whole surface carrying the thickness of a brush. It is very much in progress: the drift breathes unevenly, and the flakes sometimes forget their weight.
We keep it for the mood — that grey hour when a courtyard holds its breath. 2D and 3D usually sit side by side here; this is the day painting simply learned to fall.
Not everything the studio makes is meant to be looked at. This one is only sound — a piece that came off the desk in Ableton under the working name gitalin, a little over two minutes, finished earlier in the week and posted here the way we post the images: as a fragment, not the whole thing.
DEMO · 50s · ABLETONfull track stays in the studio
What you can play here is a fifty-second demo lifted from the middle of the track, where it does the most. The full version stays on the drive — the studio rule for sound is that only a demo ever leaves the room.
The shape is the reason to keep it. It opens low and sparse, a guitar with a lot of empty room around it, almost nothing insisting. Around the middle it starts to gather: the line swells and pulls back, swells and pulls back, testing how loud it is willing to be. By the last third it has decided — the field thickens, the figure turns restless, and the quiet from the opening is gone.
We took the demo from the rising part on purpose. It is the stretch where you can hear the track making up its mind, which is the only part worth showing before the whole thing is finished.
A single vertical loop came off the ComfyUI queue today — twelve seconds at twelve frames a second, portrait, and rendered twice: once small to read the motion, then again at 2160 by 3860 so the paint would survive up close.
LOOP · 12s · COMFYUIportrait master 2160×3860
The subject is a panelka — one of those Soviet slab towers — but staged as an isometric miniature on a tilted plinth, the way you'd shoot an architect's model on a table. What carried over from the earlier pastose panelka work is the surface: the whole frame behaves like wet oil, thick and knifed-on, so a window ledge and a fleck of falling snow are made of the same material as the sky behind them.
The loop is about accretion and erosion. It opens buried in fog, an overhead field of half-built roofs; then the tower condenses into a crisp grey block with a single warm decision — an orange under-light bleeding out from beneath the base onto the platform, the only heat in an otherwise cold grey-green picture. From there the white takes over: frost and impasto climb the plinth into peaked drifts until the building is nearly swallowed and the palette collapses to almost one tone.
What we kept it for is that the snow and the brushwork are indistinguishable — you can't tell whether the tower is being weathered or simply painted out of existence. The hi-res version is the day's artifact; the small render stays in the folder as the read-through.
We rebuilt the site one decision at a time. Some parts remained. Others had to disappear.
BUILD LOG / 08 STAGES / LOOPA record of today's working states
The site became a continuous path rather than a set of pages. We removed what weakened the mark, rebuilt what deserved to remain, and left the system quieter than we found it.
01 / MORNING
A language set
Typography, colour and hierarchy became rules. The orbit palette turned into a system of directions.
02 / MIDDAY
The instrument aligned
The compass, orbits and moving mechanisms were brought into one hierarchy around the mark.
03 / AFTERNOON
The mark restored
Its scale, hollow crown and exact divisions returned. A quieter moving layer settled beneath the main mechanism.
04 / EVENING
A path opened
Navigation, contacts and briefs connected the sections. 3D returned, and every route gained a destination.
05 / NIGHT
Night settled
Snow moved behind the tree. Education and Music received new images. The day closed with fewer gestures and more certainty.
What we built today will change again. For now, it holds.
