What this is
Seven photographs from one market day, ordered and paced the way a documentary editor cuts dailies — a held wide establishing shot, quick colour cuts through the stalls, a scale-push into open water, a hold of near-silence in a stone corridor, a slow dissolve into a city at dusk, and a final shot that keeps moving under a darkening grade before several seconds of true black. The scroll bar is the timeline; how fast you move through it is the only edit decision left to make.
What it costs
One tall scroll container with a single sticky stage inside it; seven image layers stacked in DOM order and cross-faded by opacity alone, so a correct dissolve costs nothing more than raising the incoming layer's alpha over a static one beneath it. All motion is transform/opacity, rAF-throttled, and only the layer currently transitioning carries will-change. The whole rig is paused on document.hidden and replaced under prefers-reduced-motion with the same seven frames laid out in plain document flow, each fading in once on arrival and nothing more.
Documentary transfer
The transition grammar is the real export: hard cuts for rhythm inside a market, a scale-push to open a wide shot up, a held beat of black for a breath, a slow dissolve for a change of light, and a hard cut back into motion. That vocabulary works for any photo essay with pace in it — the reader's scroll speed becomes the projectionist's hand, and a timecode-style readout keeps the film metaphor honest instead of decorative.
