NThe Nautilusjust now
clockapub finderwaiting
The NautilusWhitby · 0.4 mi
Kitchen serving till 21:00
The NautilusWhitby · 0.4 mi
No food tonight
Bar open till 23:00
clockapub · motion studies
Ten blocks filmed, each in both cuts, sending to five channels: the finder, the board in the pub, a Google post, a Facebook post and an Instagram post (Instagram added in v1.9; STUDY 01 and the drinks films 02a/02b are out of the carousel and still show four). The pub’s own website left the fan on 2026-09-08 because it is not shipped. 09 (the festive fortnight) and 10 (the van in the car park) were added the same day; a bank-holiday film was cut on review as too close to 09 and is parked in the source. 02a/02b are out of the carousel while the drinks board is still Alpha. 03–10 are drafts off a shared factory — one timeline, one rig, one set of channel mechanics — so a note on any of them lands everywhere at once.
Chef calls in sick at four o'clock. The publican taps one control — on the phone in their apron, the tablet on the bar, or the office desktop — and every place a customer might look updates itself.
Today’s Kitchen
Friday 4:12pm — is the kitchen on?
One tap, at the moment it happens.
The selection control is one DOM node moved between three chassis, so the timeline is shared — scrub to a frame, then switch device and you are comparing the identical moment. Widths are real (phone 390pt, tablet 768pt, desktop 1040px); heights are cropped to the content.
Same four o'clock, drawn on the board behind the bar. The two things a kitchen already does when it shuts — and the one new thing that makes them count everywhere else.
Four o’clock. Chef rings in sick.
The figure is a joint rig — nine points lerped between eight authored poses — rather than drawn frames, so the walk, the push and the reach all come off one scrubbable clock. The wobble is a single feTurbulence displacement over the whole scene, which is what stops the straight lines reading as CAD.
The five connected channels launch on a fan with an overshoot ease, so each arrives with a bit of snap rather than gliding to a stop. Instagram and X are parked for now — the unconnected-channel upsell can come back once the core beat is settled.
Why the closing label sits dead centre. Anything approaching the ring from one side lands next to whichever token is nearest and reads as pointing at that one — which is the opposite of the claim. Under all five, on the centre line, is the only position that cannot be misread. The bracket now runs beneath the ring with its ends turned up toward the outer two, so it encloses rather than indicates.
The chalkboard sells why a publican would ever open the app; the device ripple sells what the app then does. Two halves of one sequence, not two options.
Four o’clock. Chef rings in sick.
Not a scaled-down landscape. In 450px the walk between hatch and door has nowhere to go, so the wall carries both and the figure takes two steps instead of five. The height that portrait gives you goes where it is worth most: the fan of channels opens upward through 138°–42° at a longer radius, and the phone close-up drops into the floor space beneath the figure rather than fighting him for width.
Beat timings are identical to the landscape cut, so the two are directly comparable — only the staging moved. Everything else is the same rig: the landscape study exports its pose table and draw function and this consumes them, so there is one stick figure in the file rather than several.
The obvious next step is a 4:5 crop for feed placements, which needs a third staging again — wider than this, shorter than the landscape.
Part two. The clip has been round for twenty minutes, the cellar's had a visit, and there's a stout on where the IPA was. The room finds out the moment he turns the clip. Everyone else finds out the same way as before.
IPA’s off. Time to get another on.
The descent was wrong and the drawing was the reason. The old version drew a flight of treads falling 56px while the figure dropped 180 — his feet never touched a step, so it read as sinking through the floor. Worse, it was a cutaway that showed the stairs but hid the man, which contradicts itself.
Drawing it honestly is not available: a stair at a believable pitch needs about 214px of run to swallow a 172px figure, which is off the canvas. So nothing is drawn below the line. The floor edge does the work, he goes behind it, and there is no geometry left for the motion to disagree with.
What makes it read as stairs now is the cadence, not the scenery: five even treads of 36px, each one landed and held for 60ms. A smooth slide down a diagonal is a person sinking; the pause at the bottom of each step is the only thing that says stairs. Keyframes carry a ground y as well as an x, so it is the same rig standing on a lower floor each time.
The empty bar holds for 1.3 seconds while he's down there. That pause is the joke and it is also the point: the pub is running with nobody able to tell anyone anything.
The Today’s Bar list is about what’s come on, not what’s gone off. It leads with the ales that are pouring and lands the new arrival — Whitby Jet Stout — as the star, in amber with a just on tag. The customer cares what they can order tonight; the departed IPA is not news.
IPA’s off. Time to get another on.
Portrait puts the cellar where it belongs — down. The descent that runs sideways-and-down across the landscape frame here drops straight down the tall one, which is the shape the story always wanted. Same poses, same beat timings, same rig; only the geometry is restaged for 9:16.
The Today’s Bar panel moves above his head and clears the instant he presses send, so the four channels burst out of the space it was occupying — the same edit as the guest-ale portrait cut. The list leads with what’s on and lands the new stout as the star.
Composed for a height-crop. The whole bar-and-figure assembly sits in the lower half (ground at 610 of 800) so the payoff — the Today’s Bar panel and the channel fan — lands entirely in the top 400px and survives if a shorter screen crops the bottom. The figure sends from frame centre, so the fan is symmetric on a 320px radius with real margin at both edges. 610 is about as low as the bar can go: the descent still needs room for a full-height figure to sink below the floor line before the frame ends. Draft staging: descent spacing, the “tells the room” annotation and the exact fan arc are the first things to scrub-check.
IPA’s off. Time to get another on.
The figure is drawn twice against the same pose: solid, clipped above the counter top, and dotted, clipped below it. Nothing switches or crossfades — the counter line itself is the boundary between what a customer sees and what they don’t, so his legs go to dots the moment he steps behind the bar and stay that way all the way down.
The rank is four casks stillaged head-on, the way you meet them in the aisle, and the beer line runs up through the ceiling to the pump above. Moving that line is the actual job: it pins to the spent keystone, then to his hand, then to the fresh cask — and because the tap pose puts his hand exactly on a keystone, both handovers are continuous rather than a jump. The spent cask gets crossed out behind him.
Trapdoor, flight, cellar floor and the whole rank are hidden line. It makes the argument without a caption: the entire middle of this animation happens where no customer can see it, and the only thing that ever reaches them is the clip — and the phone.
My read: the x-ray is the better idea and the weaker picture. It says more, but the dotted middle section is visually quiet where the side-steps version gives you a real disappearance and a held empty frame. If the cellar trip is a beat you want people to feel, take the side steps; if it is a point you want them to understand, take this.
The clock settles on 4:12 — the time it is in both films — the wordmark chalks on, and one line does the rest. Decided 2026-09-08: “Change it once. It’s everywhere.” The other candidates stay on the right for the record.
My read. Both of your starting phrases describe the category rather than the promise. “Real-time pub management” is accurate but management sounds like more work, which is the opposite of what these films argue — and every SaaS in every sector says it. “Pub customer management” reads as CRM, and that is a genuinely different product: clockapub looks after information about the pub, not relationships with customers. A publican hearing it would expect loyalty cards and mailing lists.
My pick is “Change it once. It’s everywhere.” It is the thesis in six words, it is literally what both films show, and the promise is about effort rather than software. It also survives being read cold by someone who has not seen the animation. “Less admin. More pub.” is the warmest and the most quotable, and would be my choice if the card had to work with no film in front of it — but it says nothing about what the thing does.
On the portrait cut. Same five beats on the same clock, restaged rather than scaled. Portrait gives you height and takes width away, so the clock grows and moves up into its own air, the wordmark drops a size to keep its margins, and the whole lockup sits high — roughly the top two-thirds — because that is where a thumb is not and where a caption bar is not. The strapline steps down a size band too, which matters: the longest candidates are 38 characters, and at landscape sizes they would touch both edges of a 450px board.
If you want a belt-and-braces lockup, the pattern that works is strapline plus a small category descriptor: Change it once. It’s everywhere. on the card, with pub information, everywhere it needs to be as the one-liner in the app store, the footer and the pitch deck. Two jobs, two lines — don’t make one line do both.
A cask blows halfway through a pull. The publican turns the clip round — the two hundred year old signal that says "this one's gone" — and it reaches precisely the people already standing at the bar.
Friday teatime. The IPA’s been flying.
Everything on the bar is measured against the figure: counter at 1.12m, pump body 0.42m on top of it, handle tip at shoulder height. That is why the reach reads as a real pull rather than a stretch — the hand is pinned to the lever tip and the lever drives both.
Part two — putting the next one on — is block 02b.
The turn of the clip is the whole argument. It is a genuinely good signal that has worked for two centuries and reaches exactly the people who can already see the pump. Everyone deciding whether to come gets nothing. This is Today’s Bar in the dashboard — live cask list, on / soon / off per beer, currently PoC-gated to pubs carrying bar data.
Friday teatime. The IPA’s been flying.
The bar is drawn 1.4×. A first pass simply moved the landscape furniture into a taller frame, which left the publican at 21% of the height against 43% in landscape — half the presence, on the format where the screen is smallest. Enlarging the scene rather than trimming the empty space around it is the fix; the space was a symptom.
All three pumps stay, and they spread wider than landscape — 74 apart rather than 60. The live pump absorbs that for free, because it does not move and the pull is measured off it alone. The counter runs the full width and off both edges: the frame is a crop of a longer bar, which is what it is.
The publican had to come off centre. Every pump is on one side of him, so centring him is precisely what squashes the rank into the left half — the two constraints are the same constraint. He moves right, and the fan leans left over the bar instead of opening symmetrically. It is also the better gesture: he is throwing it out over the room, not straight up in the air.
The back bar still goes. Three bottles and a shelf are set dressing, and in 450px set dressing is the first thing that has to pay rent.
Type is sized for a phone, not for this page. At a 1080-wide export the cask names were landing around 11 CSS px on a handset and the panel label nearer 9 — under the ~12px floor where small type stops being read and starts being skipped. Names, states, button and channel captions all step up, and the panel grows to hold them. The chalk in the scene was already fine; it was only ever the UI text that was too small.
The cask list moved to sit directly above his head, and clears at the exact moment he presses send — so the four channels burst out of the space the panel was occupying. In landscape they are separate zones; here the panel becoming the burst is the better edit.
Not one number in the pull is re-authored. Everything inside the bar group is written in the landscape cut’s own coordinates and a single transform does the restaging, so the hand cannot come off the lever — and the module imports the landscape’s pose table, keyframes, beat list and lever curve outright.