There is a genre of creative brief that sounds impossible at first: "rebuild the moment everyone remembers, 20 to 45 seconds, named by a stranger in 3 seconds — but author everything yourself." No downloaded models, no traced frames, no film audio, no likenesses. Just geometry, light, camera, and sound.
We've now built six of these: the Raiders of the Lost Ark boulder run, The Shining corridor, Back to the Future clock tower, Ghostbusters rooftop, RoboCop boardroom, and most recently the E.T. moon shot (six scene rebuilds, now retired from the storefront). Here is how one of them works.
The E.T. moon shot (36 seconds)
The brief was the signature frame: a bicycle silhouette crossing the full moon. The whole scene lives in a single self-contained HTML file — Three.js r185 inlined, zero runtime fetches, opens straight off disk with the network dead.
The money shot, t=26s: bike projected inside the moon disk from t=22 to t=30s, bike width ≈ 36% of the moon's diameter.
What makes a rebuild "faithful, not free"
- Recognisability is geometry, not texture. A full moon plus a bicycle with two riders is the film's signature. Silhouettes do the work — no faces, no actor likenesses, no logos.
- Beats carry the scene. The 36 seconds are cut on film beats: gathering in the clearing, pedal, lift-off, climb, the moon crossing, the fingertip glow. The camera is one continuous move that tilts up with the flight.
- Sound is synthesized, not sampled. The score is an original ambient progression (Am add9 → Fmaj7 → Cmaj7 → Gadd9) built from Web Audio oscillators; wind, a heartbeat synced to E.T.'s chest glow, and a shimmer at the crossing are all generated in-file. Never the film's music, no dialogue.
- Determinism for proof. Randomness is seeded once at build time;
renderAt(seconds)makes every frame reproducible, so screenshots and graders see exactly what was authored. - Provenance is part of the deliverable. Every entry ships with a
sources.md(film, qualification, geometry, audio, license) and a concept note with the shot list and measured render stats.
Why "self-contained offline" matters
A single HTML file with the engine inlined means the scene runs on a mid-range phone at 60fps, survives air-gapped grading, and never breaks when a CDN changes. Our busiest frame is under 10,000 triangles and 60 draw calls.
Want the pipeline instead?
We no longer take custom scene rebuild orders, but the full production pipeline is available as a digital kit: deterministic app.js template, single-file inline build, headless capture, and an offline verification checklist.
Three.js Scene Build Toolkit — one-time purchase
The exact pipeline used to build all six scenes: template, build tooling, capture scripts, verification checklist.
View the Three.js Scene Build Toolkit — €19