Freeze Frame · The Transformation

FREEZE FRAMEPRIVATE TEST · the rings (1:24–1:25) · Metropolis (1927)

Loading the lab, the coffin and the Machine-Man…

Director's viewfilm3D

What you're looking at

PRIVATE TEST. The player shows 88 s of the HD film (1:24:24–1:25:52), our encode, no sound. No title cards in this stretch.
Two ways in: on a throne shot (the rings) or on a lightning shot (looking back at the coffin). Once inside you stay for the whole transformation, through the cutaways.
Invented or approximate: Maria is an image-to-3D figure built from studio reference photos (not the 1927 actress); the set is built from three film angles; the rings and lightning are 3D light timed to the film's shots (ring heights tracked from the film). Rotwang works his switches at a desk: his animation is posed by hand-made targets (lever, dial, gaze), not tracked from the film.
Step inside is lit only during the marked shot (gold on the scrubber). Elsewhere it counts down to the next shot.
Stepping in or out never moves the film clock. Space plays and pauses in both views. If the shot ends while you're inside, you glide back to the film and it keeps playing.
Acting in 3D so far: Fredersen's step is tracked from the film (around 42:46). Rotwang and the Machine-Man hold their pose from the frozen frame for now; their tracking is the next step.
Entry while playing has a test switch: keeps playing, pauses, or soft landing (slows to a quarter speed for 1 s, then eases back to normal over 2 s).

The director's view is the real HD frame; the 3D scene matches it to about 0.3 brightness levels out of 255, so stepping out of the frame is one continuous move.
The wall, throne front, platform and floor are painted with the film's own pixels and lighting.
The film in the player is from the HD source: photographed 1927 footage, with the restoration's English title cards covered by ours, no original audio.
Room size, camera height and the platform outline are measured from the frame's perspective lines.

The platform: a raised dark field with a light stone rim and glowing glass slabs on glass feet, read from this frame, nearby frames and a production still.
Ceiling, side and front walls, corners: dark plaster continuing the film's wall tone and its mottle, darkening upward as the film's wall does.
Fredersen and Rotwang are complete 3D models generated from AI turnaround drawings (FAL Hunyuan3D v3.1 Pro for Fredersen, Tripo v3.1 for Rotwang), posed by a skeleton to the film's outline. No film pixels are painted on them. The Machine-Man is a full 3D model too (Tripo v3.1 from a seated turnaround sheet), fitted to her outline in the film and given a polished-metal finish.
Tools: FAL (Hunyuan3D v3.1 Pro), Tripo v3.1, Hunyuan3D-2mv (Tencent Hunyuan Community License), ChatGPT image generation (turnaround drawings), SAM 2.1 (Apache-2.0), LaMa (Apache-2.0), Depth Anything V2 Small (Apache-2.0), meshoptimizer/gltfpack (MIT). Score: original, synthesized for FREEZE FRAME.

Very close up: Fredersen's eyes look half-closed, Rotwang's nostrils sit slightly off the skin texture, the fingers of Rotwang's raised glove are fused, and his shoe is cut flat by the floor.
The Machine-Man's elbows sit a little closer to her body than in the film.
The shared timeline is desktop-only in this test; in a headset you start inside 3D, paused on the frozen frame.
In a Quest headset the older lighter figures load automatically; the new 3D men load at full size (performance not yet measured on a headset).

Enter VR (bottom bar). You start where the film camera stood, with the film frame in front of you. Pull the trigger or step forward and it becomes the set.
CC on the player bar (or the CC button below the film on a computer): captions. The title cards’ words in white, short descriptions of the action in amber [brackets]. Off until you turn them on; remembered next time. The first time you play the film with captions off, a small one-time note points at CC for a few seconds.
Left stick: walk. Right stick: turn. A: back to the film's view. B: performance readout. X: 30-second performance test (walk around while it runs). Y: film-look presets (current, full film look, full + amber, clean).

Full film

this test: 3 min of 2 h 29 min

--:-- Entry while playing (test):