M1 · Baritone
raw, gritty, on the grid
The only take that stays on the planned 96 BPM grid in every section, which is why the film was drawn to it.
| Length | 2:18.9 |
| Light runs out | 2:09.8 |
| Tempo | 96 BPM |
Music · 01 · September 2026 · The Redshifts (a fictional band)
Last Light
A grunge song about the Sun turning into a black hole, and a countdown to the moment its last light stops arriving. One film, three takes of the same song.
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The songWhat if the Sun became a black hole right now?
Nothing here would notice for 8 minutes 20 seconds. A black hole with the Sun's mass pulls on Earth exactly as hard as the Sun does, so the orbit does not change, and the sunlight already on its way keeps arriving as if nothing happened.
Then it runs out. The middle of the Sun's disc is one solar radius closer to us than its edge, so its last light lands first: the Sun goes dark from the centre outward, a shrinking ring of light, over about 2.3 seconds.
The video opens six minutes after the collapse and counts down the direct sunlight that is left. The countdown reaches zero on the downbeat where the band crashes back in on "DARK!". After that, only reflected light is still on its way: the Moon goes out 2.5 seconds later, Neptune about 8 hours later.
A thought experiment: the real Sun has far too little mass to collapse, let alone all at once. Everything else on screen is sourced physics.
- 8:20.4
- Light's trip from the Sun to Earth on the story date, 25 September 2026.
- Same orbit
- Same mass, same pull. Earth keeps circling a centre that has gone dark.
- 2.3 s
- How long the disc takes to go dark, centre first.
- 3 km
- The radius of a black hole with the Sun's mass. The whole Sun, about 6 km across.
Three versionsThree takes, one film
The song was generated several times from the same lyrics and the same composition plan, and three takes were kept. They sing the same words, each on its own clock.
So the film was drawn once, against M1, and re-timed to each of the others. Every cut, every lyric and every animation moves to where that singer actually is, and each countdown lands on that take's own crash. The counter always reads the real time left in the audio you are hearing.
W1 · Four-track
the wildcard: a lo-fi demo
Asked for as a four-track demo with loose timing and tape saturation: slower, and the most dynamic of the three. It sings "all I see" in the second chorus, so its lyrics do too. It holds the bridge's last line right up to the final chorus, so one short shot drops out.
| Length | 2:18.9 |
| Light runs out | 2:08.8 |
| Tempo | about 85 BPM |
F1 · Alto
the clearest diction
An alto at a steady 105 BPM. Its final chorus skips "but you didn't let go", so that line never prints. Its "DARK!" comes in 60 ms ahead of the band and prints on the crash.
| Length | 2:19.7 |
| Light runs out | 2:10.3 |
| Tempo | 105 BPM |
How it was madeFive steps
- The physics first.Every number on screen comes from a sourced fact table (33 rows, from NASA, the IAU, gwosc.org and others). The countdown rounds up, so it never reads zero early.
- The song, then its clock.Generated with ElevenLabs Music, repaired by inpainting (a corrected Wow! line and a stop-time ending) and edited in code: a varispeed "redshift" over the bridge and a ring-out. Stems, forced alignment and beat fitting turn each take into one timing file.
- A simulated risograph.Every frame is drawn in code as four ink layers (black, fluorescent orange, blue and fluorescent pink on cream), then halftoned and misregistered like a photocopied zine. Four still plates come from an image model and are reprinted through the same inks; the black hole comes from a Schwarzschild ray tracer written for the film.
- A real chirp.The bridge riser is GW150914, the first gravitational wave ever detected, as recorded by LIGO Hanford: slowed 20 times and raised two octaves, with the merger landing on the bridge downbeat.
- Checked like a clock.Automated checks read each finished file: every lyric on screen on the frame it is sung, the countdown's digits read off the pixels, and the zero cut within one frame of the crash.
Sean set the brief and made the calls along the way: which takes to keep, no human characters, the look. Claude (Opus 5.5) built it in Claude Code.
CreditsCredits
LAST LIGHT by The Redshifts, a fictional band. Song made with ElevenLabs Music from lyrics written for this project.
GW150914 strain: LIGO Hanford via the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center, CC BY 4.0 (LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration).
Redrawn after historical sources: Newton's cannonball (A Treatise of the System of the World, 1728), the Wow! signal printout (Big Ear, 15 August 1977), the Drake equation (Green Bank, 1961). Every picture drawn in code; no real people and no logos appear.