The Astronomer is a low-bitrate short film about observation, the boundaries of agency, and the aesthetic consequences of legibility.
The reason it looks so strange is that the original AV1 export needed to be extremely small, around 2 MB at 1440p. I ended up building a custom animation and rendering pipeline so the image stayed close to optimal for the encoder, and that constraint guided almost every aspect of the film.
Sound on is recommended, ideally with headphones or at least low background noise. I mixed it a bit wide for stylistic reasons, and because I am a complete amateur.