Notes
Everything above is generated, not filmed: fifteen hundred lines of hand-written GLSL driven by Remotion, rendered at 1920×1080 and thirty frames a second on a single GPU. No stock footage, no photographs.
Rays are bent by integrating null geodesics through the Schwarzschild metric, midpoint step by midpoint step. The accretion disk is a thin emissive sheet with Doppler beaming and gravitational redshift, so one side burns and the other side dims exactly as it should.
The fall ends in black. Then a warm point of light opens at the centre of frame and expands until the whole scene is there: no cut, no crossfade, just the same exposure adapting as your eye would.
Cumulus towers and a low deck are raymarched as one density field, lit by a sun that sits on the horizon but is never drawn. Six steps of shadow marching toward the light, plus a cool skylight fill, keep the shadows from going brown.