I wanted one object to carry the whole thing — no cast, no dialogue, just a single reflective sphere present at every point along an impossibly long timeline. Not a narrator. A witness that never looks away.
It opens in the silence before anything exists, catching the first light of a universe still deciding what it’s going to be. From there it drifts through deep time — ancient jungles, creatures too large to feel real, a first fire and the first faces gathered around it, then on into the neon and noise of everything we’ve built since. The whole way through, the orb does the one thing it’s always done: reflects whatever’s in front of it, and keeps moving.
Then, on a quiet mountaintop, far from anything it’s already seen, it stops. It can’t just mirror the world back anymore, so it steps into it — a figure of light where the sphere used to be. I kept thinking, the whole time I made this, that you don’t get to take in that much and stay outside of it forever. So near the end, I stopped letting it.