Our interpretation of Speed
Speed is usually about going faster. Here the fastest thing there is becomes something you can watch, and lose to: the speed of light is slowed until an ordinary household Roomba can beat it. Blender is the primary creation tool for the whole film.
Inspiration
Light is the fastest thing there is, so nobody ever sees it travel. What would a house look like if you could watch the light arrive?
What it does
Light is slowed by a factor of 1,199,169,832, to 0.25 m/s, and a switch is flicked in a dark house. A Roomba (0.30 m/s) sets off from under the same lamp 1.5 s later, and still gets there first. The cat it bumps has to wait in the dark for the light to arrive. The film runs in real time, so the race is real arithmetic: bulb to cat is 6.01 m, so the light needs 24.05 s; the Roomba drives 4.93 m and beats it by 6.1 s.
How we built it (what the system controls)
- One Python script builds the film from an empty Blender scene: house, props, cat, Roomba, materials, lights, camera and titles. Nothing is imported, modelled or keyframed by hand.
- The light is a sphere growing from the bulb: r = 0.25 × t. The house materials share one shader node group that compares each pixel's distance from the bulb with r: lit inside, dark outside, a glowing band at the edge. One empty's scale is the radius.
- Dust is Geometry Nodes. The readout is a frame-change handler. The soundtrack is synthesised in Python, with no samples.
- Rendered in EEVEE at 1080p on a 2019 Intel MacBook, one Blender process per frame, by a resumable script with a stall watchdog.
Challenges we ran into
On this integrated GPU, only the first EEVEE render in a Blender session was fast, so every frame gets its own process. Renders stalled whenever the display slept, so the script kills and retries any frame that stops making progress.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Rebuilding the scene from the script and re-rendering four test frames gave three bit-identical to the published ones and one with an invisible difference. The audio script regenerates the soundtrack byte for byte.
What's next
An improved version is rendering, with a new opening, a race readout, a more characterful Roomba and cat, and light that the walls actually block.
AI and third-party disclosure
- No AI-generated images, video, textures, models or audio.
- Made with an AI coding assistant (Claude, by Anthropic), which wrote and ran the Blender Python scripts and helped develop the idea. I directed and approved the work.
- Typeface: Inter (SIL Open Font License), bundled with Blender. No other third-party assets.
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