Microfilm · Static site builder

Build your own Microfilm site

This site is a Microfilm reel — 385,837 frames of government UFO files, scrubbable like a strip of film. The same tool that built it turns your PDFs, videos, images, office documents, or entire folders into an equally fast static website. One command in, one URL out.

# one file → hosted site microfilm report.pdf # → https://report-x7f3a.pages.dev # a whole collection → one continuous reel microfilm --from-folder ./my-archive --title "My Archive" # keep it local, or ship a single portable archive microfilm demo.mp4 --no-deploy microfilm report.pdf --outfile report.mfm && microfilm play report.mfm

Streaming engineered for the human hand

Instant representative feedback

Grab the slider and throw it anywhere — even across 300,000 frames on a slow connection — and a position-true preview appears immediately, powered by packed storyboard index sheets (~1 KB per frame).

Progressive quality on every pass

Regions you linger on are quietly upgraded in the background: micro → thumbnail → full resolution. Scrub the same stretch again and it plays back sharp and instant.

Bandwidth-aware, never janky

A live throughput estimator budgets all background loading with headroom, so prefetching never starves the frame under your cursor — from fiber down to 3G.

Gestural precision

Slow, deliberate input gives fine frame-by-frame control; fast drags cover ground with naturally larger strides. Wheel, keyboard, touch, momentum — all mapped to velocity.

Any media, one reel

PDFs, videos, images, and Office documents are all reduced to frames and stitched into one continuous, seekable timeline with per-source metadata.

Pure static hosting

No backend, no database. The output is a folder of files that deploys to Cloudflare Pages out of the box — or any static host, or an offline .mfm archive.

How it works

Microfilm is a single Rust binary. It converts your sources locally (via poppler/ffmpeg), renders every page and frame into a multi-tier quality ladder — full pages, thumbnails, and storyboard contact sheets — writes a compact manifest, and bakes in the same adaptive streaming viewer this site runs. Deployment is a Cloudflare Pages direct upload; nothing about your documents ever touches our servers.

Verified by an automated perceptual regression suite that simulates real scrubbing gestures under throttled network profiles — the streaming quality you feel here is measured, not vibes.