Spec
The one-breath promise.
A teaser doesn't explain the city. It makes you need to see it. Ninety seconds: silence, a discovery, a descent, a montage of the impossible, a threat — then the title, and a door left open.
The board · 16 shots
Shot by shot.
Pure black. Held three full seconds. Then a low sound felt before heard.
A dead, cracked plain under a bruise-coloured sky. Wind. Dust. The end of somewhere.
A single shaft of warm gold light punches up out of the earth. The only light for a hundred miles.
Camera drops into the shaft — surface falls away above, gold light rushing past. We're going down.
Reveal: stratum after stratum of a city carved downward, terraces glowing, tiny figures moving. Vast.
The heart: the reactor core behind glass, breathing cyan, a contained sun. Faces lit in awe.
MONTAGE (fast): a maglev pod tears down the spine; vertical farms flush green; data vaults glow.
Surface, boardroom glass, cold daylight. A powerful figure watches the glowing portal on a screen, unsmiling.
Quick cuts of conflict: a hearing, a hand on a red-lined gauge, workers massing on the maglev spine.
Hard cut to near-black — only the core's cyan glow, pulsing once, twice, like a held breath.
The whole geode floods with light top-to-bottom at once — the money shot. Gold and cyan, every stratum alive.
Cut to black. The wordmark resolves, lit from within by a cyan pulse. Hold.
Tagline fades up beneath the mark, then a final coreward pulse and cut to black.
Black. A beat of nothing — then, faint, the hum returns for half a second before the true end. The city is still there.
Every frame above is buildable from the AETHER 3D engine (Vol. I §10 of the whitepaper) as pre-vis, then finished with plates and score. The teaser and the investor walkthrough share one asset pipeline — the model is the set.