Belonging

How it is played

Full-screen on a phone held sideways. There are no controls beside the picture: when Tap to human appears in it, a tap anywhere stops the scene.

Hard cut to a close-up of the face. Everything stops.
Wind and one swelling chord; a slow push-in, then a cut to what they long for.
Three jump cuts into the eyes, each with a drum hit.
Smash cut to the wide shot. Nothing moves. Silence.
The fart. A flash, a punch-in and a shake that rings down; whatever is loose is thrown, falls, and knocks into its neighbours. Two seconds of wreckage.
Close-up: the eyes snap left, then right.
Reaction shot of the witness, who gets the last word. Then a hard cut to the next era.

Tonight: she types a message, deletes it, puts the phone down, picks it up again.
The Moon: she keeps raising an antenna to call home and it keeps falling over.
Paris: the executioner reaches for the lever, holds it, and cannot pull it.
The abbey: the abbess lifts a hand to the rose window and waits for a sign that does not come.
The mountain: the master sits to empty her mind, and a single leaf lands on her nose. Every time.
Pompeii: the baker stacks the morning's bread and the tremors keep shaking it down. She looks to the mountain to be still.
The cave: she marks the wall with her hand so someone will know she was here.
The shore: it crawls out of the sea and the sea takes it back.

Ambience: each scene has its own loop (night traffic, breathing in a helmet, a restless square, plainchant, wind in a pine, cicadas in a Roman street, a fire in a cave, surf). It hushes on the press and is gone by the silence.
The fart: real recordings from the project folder, one per scene, heard in that scene's space. A tune made of them plays under the end card.
The impact: a low thump under the fart and the clatter of what it knocks over. On the Moon there is only the thump. In Paris it is the blade; on Mount Hua, the bell. In Pompeii the mountain answers a third of a second later, and keeps going.
The narrator: he opens the film like a wildlife documentary, over the bedroom, and the prompt waits for him. He speaks again halfway, as the mountain scene begins, has the last word at the shore, and closes the film over the sleeping room. On his very last line he drops the documentary voice entirely.
The last word: a knock on the wall, Houston, a head in a basket, a novice, a disciple, a customer at the bakery, the painter, and the narrator. In the last scene every window in the street answers in turn.

The sounds have not been packed yet.

Ambience, crashes and voices are generated by tools/generate-sounds.mjs and packed into sounds.js.