SMALL LIGHTS

On the last night before his lighthouse is switched off forever, a lonely keeper who has written “Nothing to report” in his logbook for forty years receives an answer to his light, from a tiny anglerfish who swam up from the bottom of the sea because she thought the lighthouse was calling her.

The lighthouse flashes three times every eight seconds, and in this film every flash is a note: the three-flash call is a question in the music, and it is not answered until the keeper answers with his lantern.

The picture and the score are code. The characters, the sea, the lighthouse and the deep were built and animated in Three.js, and the score and sound were synthesized from the same cue list that drives the picture. The English narration was written by Claude and voiced with Kokoro, an open-source speech model run locally; the Hebrew subtitles (CC) translate it. No image, video or music generation models were used.

Prefer the film as it was first made, without narration? Watch the original wordless edition.

Best with sound on. Keys: Space play/pause, ← → 5 seconds, F full screen, M mute, C subtitles.