Plate IV · Experiment
Opening crawl
Opening crawl
Write the episode, the title and the crawl, then watch your own words roll away into the stars. Copy the link and it carries the whole script with it.
A long time ago on a sheet far, far away....
Episode IV
A NEW SHEET
It is a period of quiet on the press. A lone developer, working from a small room in New Delhi, has pressed a portfolio onto two plates and hung it on the open web.
Pursued by deadlines, the developer races home aboard a freight train of side projects, custodian of the one rule that can restore sanity to the stack: the simplest tool that solves the problem usually wins.
Click the screen to run it again
How it works
The crawl is three CSS declarations doing all the work. The stage has perspective, the text is rotated back on its bottom edge, and one keyframe moves it from below the screen to above it. The fade at the top is a mask, not a second element. The crawl on screen is not a video and not a canvas; it is a paragraph, tilted.
The script lives in the address bar, as plain query text, so it never touches a server. Editing rewrites the link as you type, copying it gives someone else exactly what you wrote, and the page itself stays a static file. The run time is set from the word count, so a long crawl takes as long as it needs and a short one does not drag.
Download redraws the same geometry frame by frame on a canvas and hands you a GIF for a short crawl or a video for a long one. The video records in real time, so a forty second crawl takes forty seconds to film. If your system asks for less motion, the crawl holds still and you read it as a poster instead.