Showroom · Make-of

How Velours was made

A golden-hour jewellery film with no video file on the page. Six scenes that read as paused footage — five frames are photographs, one is an AI-generated still made for this film, and every bit of motion is code.

What it demonstrates

That the film feeling is a stack of small, cheap illusions, not a video codec. A luxury commercial is slow camera movement, travelling light, grain, and confident cuts — and each of those can be built separately in the browser and layered over photography. Glance at any scene for five seconds and it reads as a paused ad; watch for two and something is already moving.

Techniques, honestly named

• Ken Burns moves — each still drifts under a 24–30 second CSS transform animation (scale + translate only), with push-ins and pull-backs alternating from scene to scene, restarted on every cut so motion is visible immediately.
• Travelling light-sweep — a skewed warm gradient band crosses each frame every eleven seconds like a shaft of low sun moving across the set, drawn with plain compositing (no blend mode) so it stays cheap on weak integrated GPUs.
• One small canvas — a single third-resolution fixed canvas draws live film grain (four pre-rendered noise tiles) plus a handful of drifting dust motes and warm bokeh sparks, updated at ~20 fps rather than on every frame so the full-screen layer isn't re-uploaded sixty times a second. It pauses when the tab is hidden or the film scrolls out of view.
• Cuts on scroll — scroll-snap chapters with a 420 ms dip-to-black on most cuts and a warm light-flash with a masked lens-flare kiss on the two hero reveals.
• Letterboxed 2.35:1 framing — scenes sit in true anamorphic-ratio frames on desktop (a taller crop in portrait), with title cards whose letter-spacing tracks in slowly between scenes.
• Respectful fallbacks — prefers-reduced-motion serves the whole film as finished stills with captions; per-scene colour grades are plain CSS filters; the price appears exactly once.
• Bring-your-own frames — every scene is a slot: any still at roughly the letterbox ratio drops in with the same Ken Burns, sweep, and grain treatment. Scène III here is an AI-generated image made for this film (resized to web weight, honest alt text, disclosed in the end-card fine print); the other five are photographs.

The upgrade path

Every scene is composed so real footage can replace its still one-for-one: the photograph is an object-fit: cover layer inside the frame, so swapping the <img> for a muted looping <video> with the still as its poster upgrades the film without touching layout, captions, grain, or cuts.

Recreate it