Two Seconds Short (差两秒) — Archive Light Table (Lemo-Opuscar) · LemoLab × Claude Opus 5.5
An unofficial film about a real event (the Wright brothers' flights of 17 December 1903) made only from
public-domain archive scans. No AI-generated images, no stock footage. The light table, glass, dust, loupe,
marks, readouts and camera are drawn in code (film.js). Sources accessed 2026-10-16; catalogue records in sources/.

ARCHIVE (Library of Congress; public domain in the United States. The Dayton Herald notice was published in 1903,
before 1931. The negatives (1903, attributed to Wilbur and/or Orville Wright; the 10:35 photograph is usually credited
to John T. Daniels) and the telegram (1903, Orville Wright) are works whose authors died in 1912 and 1948, so even as
unpublished works their U.S. term of life + 70 years ended by 1 January 2019. The Library's records list "No known
restrictions" for the Wright Brothers Negatives; dates are from the catalogue records in sources/.)
- First flight, 120 feet in 12 seconds, 10:35 a.m.; Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. 1903 Dec. 17. Glass negative.
  Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppprs-00626, https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppprs.00626
  File: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/master/pnp/ppprs/00600/00626u.tif
- Distant view of the Wright airplane just after landing … the fourth and final [flight] of December 17, 1903.
  Glass negative. LC-DIG-ppprs-00629, https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppprs.00629
  File: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/master/pnp/ppprs/00600/00629u.tif
- Wilbur in prone position in damaged machine … unsuccessful trial of December 14, 1903. Glass negative.
  LC-DIG-ppprs-00610, https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppprs.00610
  File: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/master/pnp/ppprs/00600/00610u.tif
- Newspaper notice of Wright Bros. 1st flight: Dayton Herald, Dec. 18, 1903. LC-USZ62-70686,
  https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b18080
  File: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/master/pnp/cph/3b10000/3b18000/3b18000/3b18080u.tif
- Telegram from Orville Wright in Kitty Hawk, N.C., to his father announcing four successful flights, 1903 Dec. 17.
  Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers, Manuscript Division (P&P copy LC-USZ62-65459, https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b12982).
  Colour scan from https://www.loc.gov/resource/mcc.061/ via Wikimedia Commons, public domain:
  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Telegram_Orville_Wright_17_dec_1903.jpg
- Modifications: inversion to a negative for the light table, emulsion masks, levels, the Flyer and Wilbur cut into
  layers with the background filled (tools/prep.py), the telegram's scan mat trimmed.

MUSIC (original score, mix.py, sampled instruments through core/audio/sampler.py)
- Piano: "Salamander Grand Piano V3" by Alexander Holm, licensed under CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
- Samples (CC0): FreePats project (freepats.zenvoid.org), VS Chamber Orchestra: Community Edition (Versilian Studios),
  Versilian Community Sample Library (Versilian Studios) — strings, glass, bowed vibraphone, timpani, suspended cymbal
- Foley and beds (light-table hum, loupe on glass, paper, ticks, pen, wind, surf): synthesised in mix.py with core/audio/sfx.py

VOICE
- Kokoro-82M (hexgrad), voice bm_george, Apache License 2.0; run locally via kokoro-onnx (MIT) through core/tts/tts.py.
  Speech check: faster-whisper small.en (MIT; OpenAI Whisper weights, MIT).

FONTS (SIL Open Font License 1.1; tools/fonts.py fetches every face from Google Fonts and the licence texts from
github.com/google/fonts into fonts/; Chinese faces subset with the CSS2 API &text=)
- IBM Plex Mono, IBM Plex Sans — IBM
- Noto Sans SC, Noto Serif SC — Google / Adobe
