RIMROCK is a self-initiated demo of a format I build for adventure and destination businesses: the whole page is one unbroken camera move through the operator's own photographs, so the visitor experiences the trip before they read a word about it.
The business
Adventure and destination businesses sell an experience, but their websites usually sell a grid of photos. The operators who most need to show what a day with them feels like are exactly the ones who can't fund a film crew, and stock footage sells someone else's trip. Meanwhile they already own the raw material: hundreds of real photographs from real days out.
The real problem
Make a website that carries the feeling of a film, without any film. It had to run from ordinary still photographs, hold a single continuous camera move from the first pixel to the last section (no visible cuts between scenes) and still behave like a website: fast, readable on a phone, and honest to anyone who scrolls back up.
My responsibility
Everything: the concept and brand world, the imagery, the depth-and-camera pipeline that turns flat photos into a space you move through, the WebGL engine, the copy, the motion tuning, and the measurement harness that proves it stays smooth.
What was built
01
Each still is analysed for depth and rebuilt as a three-dimensional surface, so the camera can move into the photograph rather than across it, parallax that comes from the real shape of the scene, not a fake layer slide.
02
The five scenes are stations along a single camera path. Scrolling doesn't switch slides; it moves the camera forward through a continuous space, which is why no cut is ever visible.
03
Where one world becomes the next, the camera passes through a wall of drifting dust. The change happens inside the atmosphere, the way a film hides a transition in a whip-pan, the join is designed, not disguised after the fact.
04
A live elevation readout in the header climbs from the valley floor to the rim as you scroll, doubling as the progress indicator, narrative and navigation in the same element.
05
A scripted harness drives the finished page in a real browser, captures every scene at its exact scroll position, and measures per-frame timing across the whole page, so smoothness is a recorded number, not an opinion.
System view
A single still (ideally the operator's own) chosen for depth and light.
A depth model runs on my own hardware and produces a map of how far away every pixel is.
The photograph becomes a three-dimensional surface the camera can travel into.
Scenes are positioned along one continuous route, with atmosphere covering every join.
The finished page is driven and timed in a real browser before it is called done.
Inspectable proof
Sanitized artifacts show the underlying work without exposing client identities, credentials, private dashboards, or customer data.
Scroll it end to end: one continuous camera move from the trailhead at dawn to the canyon rim at dusk, built entirely from still images.
Open the RIMROCK demoWhat this entry does and does not claim.
Evidence
The finished five-scene scroll-film is deployed and can be scrolled end to end at rimrock-demo.pages.dev.
A scripted full-page scroll on a 1440x900 viewport recorded a worst single frame of 26 ms and zero frames over the 50 ms jank threshold; a narrow-viewport check confirmed no horizontal overflow.
Before this demo existed, the photo-to-space pipeline was run on an operator's own drone photography to confirm it works on ordinary real-world images.
Results & current state
A film-grade scroll experience with no film in it.
Five photoreal scenes and one unbroken camera move, produced entirely from still images, no footage, no crew, no stock.
Cinematic motion inside a real performance budget.
Worst measured frame 26 ms across a full-page scripted scroll, zero frames over the jank threshold, verified in a real browser rather than estimated.
The format transfers to an operator's own photo library.
The depth-and-camera pipeline was proven on real client photographs before this demo was built; only the demo's fictional brand required generated imagery.
Describe your setup in a few sentences. You'll get a plain answer about whether and how I can help.