(Design breakdown)Culture
A documentary needs to feel like footage, not like a website with a video in it.
Film / WebGL
A feature documentary told as the survey record of one descent — six stations of true 4K ocean under a WebGL-treated hero.
(What was decided, and why)
01
No navigation bar competing with the frame, no card layout interrupting the descent — the film runs full-bleed and the interface is reduced to a thin tracked serif title and instrument-style timecode and depth readouts, styled to look like part of the footage rather than a website’s controls.
Open the live site: there is no visible header until you scroll past the opening film.
02
The hero is WebGL-treated for a genuinely different look from a plain video tag — a deliberate choice, not a default, because WebGL is the heaviest tool available and this is the one piece on the wall that spends the budget on it.
The 11.5MB page weight (see metrics below) is real, and it is almost entirely this one decision — every other piece on the wall is under 5MB.
03
The descent is structured as six discrete stations rather than one continuous scroll-linked animation, which is what keeps it from becoming the kind of laggy, everything-moves-together experience the studio deliberately avoids everywhere else.
Scroll through the live site — each station settles before the next begins; nothing is pinned or scroll-scrubbed.
(By the numbers)
Captured live from the actual deployment on 2026-08-26 — Lighthouse scores, not estimates. Re-run it yourself against the live link below and it should read close to this.
The one score that looks low here is SEO, and it is the sales-catalog domain’s deliberate noindex setting, not this piece — see the note above.