An animatic of the three visits to the thatched cottage at Longzhong, adapted from Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義), chapters 36–38. Winter 207 – spring 208 AD.
33 shots, 3 minutes 30 seconds, with a synthesised score — and it exports a real .webm.
Fourth in a set, after Red Cliffs 赤壁, Guandu 官渡 and 六出祁山.
The first three films are wars: a river, a plain, a mountain range. This one has no army, no fire and no siege in it. The entire story is a man riding a long way three times to knock on a door, and being told twice that nobody is home.
That makes it the mirror of the Qishan film. Both are built on a returning shot. There, repetition ends in futility — six campaigns, the same mountains, nothing gained. Here the same device resolves: the same gate in the same bamboo fence, three times, with the season turning behind it, until the third time it is open.
Two decisions follow from that:
- Zhuge Liang is kept off screen for two-thirds of the film, because his absence is the subject. His portrait plate — the device every other film in the set uses to introduce a character on arrival — is deliberately withheld until he finally wakes up.
- The climax is a map, not an action. The 隆中對 is the payoff, so
empireMapis the one thing in the drawing library rendered with any precision: the two rivers, and the three shares filling in one at a time as he explains them.
| 薦賢 | "Sleeping Dragon and Fledgling Phoenix. Get either one and the empire can be settled." |
| 一顧 | Late autumn. A boy answers: "He goes where he likes. Nobody knows where." |
| 二顧 | Deep snow, on purpose. His brother is home; he is not. A letter is left at the gate. |
| 三顧 | Spring. He is asleep, and Liu Bei stands at the foot of the steps for two hours. |
| 隆中對 | Hold Jing and Yi, keep the passes, wait for the empire to shift. |
| 魚水 | "My having Kongming is as a fish having water." |
A thatched cottage with snow that can lie on it, a bamboo fence with a wicket gate that
can stand open, pine and plumBranch, snowfall and snowDrift, a plank bridge, a
tethered horse cropping grass, couchAndScreen, and empireMap.
Nothing military survived from the previous films except the palettes and the figure.
Public domain, provenance printed in-frame on each plate. Details in
assets/portraits/sources.json.
| Character | Source |
|---|---|
| 劉備 Liu Bei | 清代人物畫 |
| 諸葛亮 Zhuge Liang | 《三才圖會》萬曆三十七年 (1609) |
| 關羽 Guan Yu | 清代人物畫, before 1912 |
| 張飛 Zhang Fei | 清代繡像本 |
| 司馬徽 Sima Hui | 清代繡像本 (1906) |
Swap in your own: drop a video file on the page and grab a frame, use the cast panel, or
put images in characters/ — gitignored, so nothing you add is committed or uploaded.
python3 -m http.server 4795 --directory .Space plays/pauses, ←/→ skip five seconds, clicking a shot jumps to it, Director's view burns shot data into the frame.
Export .webm writes a real VP9 + Opus file at 1280×720. It records in real time (3:30),
and live-recorded WebM has no duration header — ffmpeg -i in.webm -c copy out.webm fixes
that without re-encoding. Export needs Chrome or Edge.
Adapted from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, attributed to Luo Guanzhong, c. 14th century. Public domain. Code: MIT.