The Astronomer

The Astronomer is a low-bitrate short film about observation, the boundaries of agency, and the aesthetic consequences of legibility.

The film was designed around an unusual constraint: its original 1440p AV1 export needed to fit in roughly 2 MB. I built a custom animation and rendering pipeline around the behavior of the encoder, and the resulting requirements – flat fields, exact repetition, constrained movement, and severe graphical forms – ended up determining the film's visual language.

Sound on is recommended, ideally with headphones or low background noise. The mix uses a deliberately wide stereo field.