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The Last Match

A tiny lit city lives inside the flame of a single match: hundreds of windows, rooftops and street lights glow above the charred head. A dark cinematic macro. Loops.

Background, V1 Effects3DSeamless loop, verified231 lines of codev1.0.0

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The Last Match preview
Starting live preview…
00:00:00:00 / 00:00:00:01

Live, running the real source at reduced resolution.

Combine several clips and hand them over together from your sequence.

A finished film

It plays exactly as rendered and has nothing to adjust. The preview runs the same code your AI receives.

Info

What it is

A macro shot of a burning match in the dark. Inside the amber flame stands a miniature city of ray-marched buildings with hundreds of individually lit windows, rooftop spires and street lights, while translucent flame sheets flow around it and embers rise from the charred wooden head. The camera eases closer over the 12 seconds and the film returns to its start, so it loops. It is restrained and cinematic rather than a physical flame simulation. The film has no settings.

Reuse it in your own idea

  • Trailer card: the flame and city are in place from the first frame, so the film can open on them.
  • Seamless loop: it returns to its start, so it repeats for any length.
  • Quote or poem backdrop: the dark space either side of the flame holds white text.

Which part is reusable

src/last-match.js is the ingredient your AI reuses. demo.js is only the example scene around it, and uses the demo harness only for the demo.

Good to know

  • The film is finished: it has no settings. To change colours or timing, edit the shader.
  • It is composed for a 4:5 portrait frame.
  • Its length is fixed at 12 seconds; repeat the loop to fill a longer clip.

Technical details

Technical details
Implementation
Three.js 0.185.1 (WebGL) · ES module src/last-match.js
Exports
  • createLastMatch() => { scene, camera, setSize(width, height), update(time), dispose() }
Dependencies (exact)
  • three@0.185.1 (source) — Renderer and a full-screen shader material.
  • apw-runtime@1.0.0 (demo) — Demo harness.
How it fits a scene

Coordinates: Composed for a 4:5 portrait frame and measured by the frame height: in a wider frame the picture stays centred at full height and its background fills the sides; in a narrower one, such as 9:16, the sides are cropped.

Lighting: The flame is the light: amber glow on the buildings and the charred match head, a violet edge at the base of the flame.

Timing: The flame sheets flow, embers rise and the camera eases closer to the miniature city; the last frame matches the first.

Output
1080×1350, 30 fps, 12 s · procedural (computed from the frame number) · seamless loop — Every part of the film is a function of the time modulo its length, and every motion completes whole cycles, so the last frame meets the first.
Tested
Rendered 360 frames on 2026-10-10 in Chrome 154.0.8037.97 headless on Linux 7.0.0-38-generic (x64), Node 22.14.0 (WebGL 2 via SwiftShader (software)). Same frame twice from fresh pages: identical. Loop: Frame 0 vs end state (progress 1): mean |Δ| 0.0000, max |Δ| 0 of 255.
Performance
One full-screen fragment shader. About 11 ms a frame at 1080 by 1350 on an integrated Intel GPU (Iris Xe), and about 2 s a frame with software WebGL. Plays at 30 frames a second at full size on an integrated GPU.
Export a video yourself
Download the source, then in the folder: npm install npm run render -- last-match/1.0.0 --out my-video.mp4Needs Node 18+, ffmpeg and Chrome/Chromium. Add --params my-settings.json (from Copy settings) for your own settings.
Version
1.0.0 · sha256:ed87a5a41ddce4cf…
Files
License
MIT. Copyright (c) 2026 AI Pixel Wizard. Released under the MIT License. See LICENSE in this folder. License details
Provenance
From the owner's collection Twenty Impossible Worlds: the original GLSL ES 3.00 shader of the film “The Last Match”, created with ChatGPT / Codex and used as published, wrapped for AI Pixel Wizard as a three.js full-screen shader in October 2026. The collection's synthesised soundtrack is not part of this ingredient.
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