COM-480 deliverable, 25% of M3, hard cap 2:00, voiceover, hosted. Live site: https://challenger-com480.vercel.app The site is 8 scenes. Capture them in scroll order and the film writes itself.
Not "here are eight charts." One barrel of crude, followed exactly the way the site scrolls, from a kilometre underground to the objects in your hands, and the quiet truth that falls out when you do.
The spirit lives in two tensions. Perform them.
- Intimate vs. planetary. The lid on your coffee, and twelve hundred barrels a second. Keep zooming between the thing in your hand and the thing the size of the world. The film should feel personal before it feels big.
- Loud vs. silent. Everyone is shouting about the 2026 crisis. Almost nobody noticed the barrel quietly changing underneath them for thirty-two years. The payoff is that the silent thing turns out to be the bigger thing.
The refrain, say it twice the way the site does: coffee lid, jacket, road, jet. Once at the climax, once at the very end. It's the thread that ties a chemistry lesson to a human life.
The on-screen question and answer. The site opens by asking "What's in a barrel?" and closes by answering "Your whole day." Let the voiceover deliver the full claim out loud at the top, "Open it, and your whole day falls out," so the spoken line and the on-screen text complete each other.
The arc (Freytag), and it's already the site's scroll order, so just walk it:
| Act | Scene(s) | Beat | Feeling |
|---|---|---|---|
| I, Exposition | 01 Open | A barrel. What's in it? | curiosity |
| II, Rising action | 02 Lift, 03 Split, 04 Route | Out of the ground, into ten cuts, out to the world, and quietly tilting toward diesel | momentum, then a first unease |
| III, Climax | 05 Live | Your whole day is in one barrel | recognition, the gut-punch |
| IV, Falling action | 06 Burn | And we are burning it this fast, on one fragile supply chain | acceleration |
| V, Resolution | 07 Fork, 08 Close | The crisis forks the chart, but it's five times smaller than the silent drift, and your day doesn't fork at all | resolve |
Note: the diesel-drift reveal used to be its own post-climax scene. It now lives inside scene 04 (Route) as a year scrubber, so the "silent shift" is seeded during the rising action and paid off at the crisis (scene 07), where the chart literally compares it to the headline shock.
Read the blockquotes straight through and they're one continuous narration. The "On screen" lines are subordinate, capture them to serve the words, not the other way around.
"What's in a barrel? A hundred and fifty-nine litres of crude you touch a hundred times a day and never see. Open it, and your whole day falls out."
On screen: "What's in a barrel?" centered on navy, a barrel below it. Click the barrel on "out": it tips, flips 180°, oil pours straight down, and the page falls with the stream into the ground. Let the pour breathe, this is the title shot.
"It starts a kilometre underground. A pump nods all day to lift it, and a pipeline carries it down the line."
On screen: The pump-jack rocks once or twice (the strokes/barrels readout climbs); click the refinery on the right to follow the pipeline. Fast and connective, don't linger.
"Then heat takes it apart. At three hundred and seventy degrees, one barrel splits into ten cuts, light gas on top, heavy tar at the bottom. Gasoline's the biggest. Diesel's next."
On screen: Let the clip-path sweep open the distillation column (each band's height is its share). Hover gasoline (≈46%), then diesel (≈30%); the side panel names each cut and shows its percent of the barrel.
"And each cut goes its own way. Most of the barrel just moves us, sixty percent of it becomes a literal road. But drag the years back, and the mix shifts: gasoline holds steady, while diesel quietly climbs eight points underneath it."
On screen: Let the ribbons draw in, hover the road-transport sector so its inbound flows isolate. Then drag the year slider from 2025 back toward 1993: the diesel ribbon visibly thins and the readout falls 30.0% → 21.9% while gasoline barely moves. This is the seed of the whole "silent drift" payoff.
"And this is where it lands. Not in a pipeline, in your day. The lid on your coffee. The road under your bus. The polyester in your jacket. The fuel that brought a jet down. Sixteen ordinary things, every one of them the same hundred-and-fifty-nine litres, days ago. Touch one, and the thread runs straight back to its cut."
On screen: In the 4×4 grid, hover four objects in turn on their nouns, coffee lid, bus, jacket, jet, each draws a ribbon to its band on the companion tower. End by hovering one tower band so every object made from it lights at once. Let each ribbon finish (~450 ms). Slow down here.
"And we are not slowing down. Right now, as you watch this, the world burns twelve hundred barrels a second, all of it riding tankers through a few narrow straits."
On screen: The live counter visibly climbs (spoken "twelve hundred" rounds the exact 1,205 bbl/s on screen). Switzerland is highlighted in the country bars by default.
"In February, the Strait of Hormuz closed, the worst oil shock since the pandemic. The forecasts split three ways, the I-E-A, the E-I-A, and OPEC. But all three fit inside one-point-six percent, five times smaller than that silent diesel drift. The chart forks. Your day doesn't."
On screen: The historical line draws, then forks into three dashed agency lines. Pull out to hold the three agency cards and the takeaway line, "1.6% of demand, five times smaller than the 8.1-point diesel drift."
"Coffee lid, jacket, road, jet, one barrel. So, what's in a barrel? Your whole day. Open it yourself, at challenger-com-four-eighty-dot-vercel-dot-app."
On screen: The closing claim "So, what's in a barrel? / Your whole day", the three anchor numbers (159 L, 104.16 Mb/d, 1,205 bbl/s), URL burned as a lower-third and held the full final ~5 s.
Why it works: opens on the on-screen question and answers it with the claim out loud; the refrain bookends climax to close; the silent-drift-beats-loud-crisis turn is the thesis, seeded in scene 04 and paid off in scene 07, not a footnote; sources spoken aloud (IEA/EIA/OPEC) at 1:35; CTA held ≥5 s. ~270 words ≈ 1:55 at a deliberate ~140 wpm; pauses are built into the budget, so don't rush the climax.
| # | Time | Scene | Trigger on cue | Framing | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0:00 | 01 Open | Click barrel → pour | Full-bleed, centered | Title shot. 2–3 takes; click on the word "out". |
| 2 | 0:11 | 02 Lift | Pump 1–2×, click refinery | Pump-jack + readout | Connective B-roll (~8 s). |
| 3 | 0:20 | 03 Split | Sweep reveal; hover gasoline→diesel | Column + info panel | The sweep is the visual; hovers show 46% / 30%. |
| 4 | 0:34 | 04 Route | Ribbons draw; hover road-transport; then drag year 2025→1993 | Full Sankey, watch the diesel ribbon | Pays off "sixty percent → a literal road" AND seeds the drift (readout 30.0→21.9). |
| 5 | 0:56 | 05 Live HERO | Hover coffee→bus→jacket→jet, then a band | 4×4 grid + companion tower; ~1.2 s/object | The graded climax. Most screen time. Let ribbons finish. |
| 6 | 1:22 | 06 Burn | Let counter tick (CHE default) | Big counter + top of country bars | Must visibly climb. |
| 7 | 1:35 | 07 Fork | Line draws + forks into 3 | Full chart → 3 cards + takeaway | Hold on "1.6% vs 8.1-point". |
| 8 | 1:55 | 08 Close | Static (or flip-to-restart at the very end) | Center claim; burn URL lower-third | CTA, hold URL the full ~5 s. |
Capture tip: record each scene as a separate clip at rest, trigger its interaction on cue, then assemble in scroll order 01→08. Don't try to scroll the whole site in one take, the page-load-anchored counter and the scroll-fired reveals make a single take fragile.
- Capture: OBS Studio, 1920×1080 @ 60 fps (smooth ribbon/area transitions), display-capture the deployed Vercel build (not
npm run dev, avoids HMR flashes). Browser at 100% zoom, full-screen, cursor visible. Reduced-motion OFF, or the pour, sweep, ribbon-draw and line-fork snap instantly and the cinematic beats die. - Voice: USB condenser mic, quiet soft-furnished room, recorded as a separate audio track so timing stays editable. Deliver it like a documentary, measured, with pauses, especially across the climax. The script is budgeted for ~140 wpm; resist racing it.
- Edit / subtitle: Cut in Descript (or DaVinci Resolve). Lay the VO first, then trim each clip to its beat in scroll order. Auto-transcribe, then hard-burn white sans subtitles (subtle dark scrim) so they survive re-encode. Keep subtitles literal to the VO so the spoken sources read on screen.
- Export / host: 1080p H.264 MP4, < 80 MB. YouTube unlisted (or Vimeo). Link it in the README and the Scene 08 closing.
- Rehearse: read the VO aloud 3× against a stopwatch before recording. If long, trim the connective beats first, #2 Lift and #6 Burn. Never trim the climax or the Route scrubber beat. Final hard check: timeline ≤ 2:00:00.
- Scenes captured and assembled in scroll order 01→08, no reordering. (Eight scenes, not nine, there is no separate trend scene.)
- Reduced-motion OFF; recording the live Vercel build, not the dev server.
- Scene 04 Route: drag the year slider (2025→1993), don't look for a play button; the diesel ribbon thins and the readout reads 30.0% → 21.9%.
- The refrain "coffee lid, jacket, road, jet" is said twice, climax and close.
- Climax grid confirmed at 16 objects in a 4×4 (script says "sixteen").
- "Twelve hundred barrels a second" = spoken rounding of the on-screen 1,205 bbl/s (not a new number); subtitles match.
- Crisis VO says "one-point-six percent" and "eight points" to match the on-screen 1.6% and the 8.1-point diesel drift; the comparison is "five times smaller."
- Sources spoken aloud (IEA / EIA / OPEC), 1:35.
- CTA URL on screen =
challenger-com480.vercel.app, held ≥ 5 s. - Final exported duration ≤ 2:00:00 (verify the file, not the edit cut). Over = penalty.