Filming the whales
How the 25 second ridge reveal at the top of this site was shot inside the game, and why nothing in it is faked.
The teaser you see looping at the top of the site is 22 seconds of a 25 second shot. I cut the first three seconds because they were the worst three seconds: a slow snowy approach before the ridge opens up. On X the full version is pinned, and the loop here starts where it gets good.
Everything in it is the game. The terrain is generated from seed 824 on a dedicated save I keep for filming. The whale and her calf are the same driftwhale species you meet in play, following an authored path so the camera can find them. The glacier rays are the same sun shafts that light a hut window or a cave mouth, found by tracing from covered cells toward open sky.
What the filming preset changes
Filming asks more of the streamer than playing does, so the camera rig warms each position for 30 seconds and doubles the vista distance from 768 to 1536 metres. The frame renders at twice its width and height with 8x MSAA and is scaled down afterwards, which takes the moire out of the far terraces. None of that touches the saved gameplay settings; the headset build never sees it.
The rule about cameras
You may notice the camera never whips. My camera rules come from VR: in the headset the view is yours and I never move it for you. The desktop filming camera borrows the same manners, with cubic paths that keep velocity continuous between keys, so the reveal feels like drifting rather than being driven.
The 80 second reel in the gallery uses the same rig for five more shots, each on a different part of the world.