The art of future filmmaking

Saturday, August 22, 2026

The night the sky broke open over the Lower Mainland.

Local reporting described a rare and severe thunderstorm over the South Coast that night — Environment Canada strike counts near Vancouver were reported at roughly 1,700 to 1,800, and coverage called it one of the largest lightning events the city has seen.

CityNews reported more than 7,000 strikes across the region, power cut to more than 20,000 people, grounded flights at Vancouver International, and wildfires started around the province.

Thunder like this is rare on this coast; the usual weather here is rain without the sky ever breaking open.

Everyone here remembers where they were.

Half the city was out on a porch or at a window that night, and the other half was caught in it. Those accounts belong beside the film, so the site collects them: where you were, what you heard, what it felt like. Each one goes on a stylised map of the Lower Mainland and into a timeline of the night.

Where were you during the storm?

• Vancouver Is Awesome — biggest lightning event recorded in the city
• CTV News — record 1,725 lightning strikes in Metro Vancouver
• CBC News — rare thunderstorm causes havoc at Vancouver airport
• CityNews — once-in-a-decade storm cuts power, ignites wildfires
• Environment and Climate Change Canada — Canadian Lightning Detection Network maps

Main Street at 44th, Vancouver

The building went up in 1910, a plain two-storey wood-frame corner store of the kind that stood at every streetcar stop in the city. Michael Kluckner's account has it opening in 1911 as the Winnott post office and grocer; Reeve and Harding's general store came after that.

In the late 1930s it was bought by the Fukuharas, a Japanese-Canadian family, who lost the store when Japanese Canadians were uprooted and dispossessed during the Second World War.

It became Wong's Market, run by the Wong family, and outlasted almost every other corner grocery on Main. Under the stucco are the original clapboard and hand-painted signage.

The porch in this film is the rear porch of that building: a heavy black roof, two posts, the garages, the wires and the alley — a hundred and sixteen years of ordinary shelter, and one night when the sky lit it all up.

• Michael Kluckner, Vanishing B.C. — Wong's Market
• Psychogeography Society of Vancouver — Corner Store #4: Wong's Market
• Maxine Schleger, SFU — Valuing and Assessing Intangible Heritage in Vancouver: The Case of Wong's Market

It started as a real shared night. The thunder came from a long way off, got closer with every count between light and sound, and then arrived overhead and wrapped the porch completely. That feeling — two people out in the weather, laughing, in joyful awe, entirely awake — is what the film is trying to hold.

The picture is generated imagery and generated motion, edited into a fifty-six-second cut and graded dark neon purple. The current punk title and credit lettering is animated in that same pass.

The sound was rebuilt from eight supplied thirty-second ElevenLabs sources, arranged into four overlapping editorial roles: a quieter rain-space bed, the main crashes, the deep rolls underneath, and the spatial answers that come back off the neighbourhood. They are constructed, not isolated field recordings of that night.

The web film carries the dedicated stereo mix. A separate local screening file adds an authored 5.1 mix at 4K — the picture there is upscaled rather than natively 4K, and the surround mix is not Atmos. Neither version has piano, score or dialogue.

The eight stills on this site are exact frame grabs from the finished V22 cut, at the timecodes shown, kept full-frame with the pillarboxing the file was delivered with. They are not new generations.

Release

Final film · V22 · 56 seconds

Picture

1920 × 1080, 24 fps, H.264 (MP4)

Sound

Dedicated stereo mix. No dialogue, no music.

• A film by Kris Krüg
• With Suzy Easton
• AI Film Club // Neon Gods
• Vancouver, 2026

The weather on the front page is not the film. Sky, cloud volumes, rain at four depths, the bolts and the porch are drawn live in your browser with Three.js and are different every time.

That browser thunder is synthesised with the Web Audio API — no recordings, no music, no speech. Rolls are scheduled from each strike's distance, so the light arrives before the sound.

The browser weather is entirely optional and completely separate from the film's own soundtrack. When the film opens, the weather goes silent and freezes; when you leave the film, it comes back up from silence. The film's audio is never ducked, remastered or mixed with anything.

Nothing makes a noise until you choose to enter. Arrival is silent by design.

The effects controls govern that browser weather only — the lightning inside the movie is already part of the picture. Flashes can be turned off on their own, weather can be paused, sound muted, and a calm mode makes it rarer and gentler. The system reduced-motion setting is honoured: the sky holds still and flashes stay off.

The stills viewer can be moved manually or set to advance slowly, with keyboard arrows, Escape and proper focus handling. If a browser can't run the moving scene, a frame from the film and the viewer are shown instead.

The browser weather is a system, not a loop: light leads sound, rain changes depth, and every interruption clears its pending effects. The film's own soundtrack is never touched by it.

The machine could multiply possibilities. It could not remember the night, recognise the shelter, or decide which image still felt true. Those judgments stayed human.

The work moved between generated frames, motion, grading, editing, sound construction and browser code — four overlapping editorial roles rather than a single prompt.

The 8 images shown across this site are exact frame extractions from the finished V22 cut, at the timecodes given. They are frame grabs, not new generations, and they keep the pillarboxing the delivered file carries.

• The finished film is playable here now: V22, fifty-six seconds, 1920 × 1080 at 24 fps with its stereo mix, served exactly as delivered.
• Type: the landing title is a transparent presentation derivative of the supplied punk title artwork, with Bangers for display accents and Barlow for interface text. Ordinary reading text uses the existing system sans.
• Palette: shelter black, bruised lavender, electric white, sodium ember.
• Built with React, Three.js and the Web Audio API. Written with Lovable.

A separate local 4K screening file exists with the dedicated stereo mix plus an authored 5.1 mix. Its picture is upscaled — not natively 4K — and the surround mix is not Dolby Atmos. It is not hosted on this site.

Thanks to Suzy Easton, to the AI Film Club, and to whoever built a corner store on Main Street in 1910 with a roof deep enough to sit under in a storm.