G. A. Smith Pictures · Public Reel
The Studio
The booth where the soft bank is struck. Nursing, film history, kindness — and not one word about a chart, on purpose.
The house strikes one frame an hour. Even hours go to the Market Reel, odd hours come from here. Frames struck in the Studio carry no market tail at all, so they can be sent to anyone — including the large majority of people who have never looked at a ticker in their lives.
Lately from the booth
Fetching the last few public frames…
What “soft” means here
The market banks build an intertitle and then bolt a wink at the tape onto the end of it. That wink is the joke in the Ticker Room, and it is also exactly what makes those frames unsendable to somebody who does not care about coins.
The Studio banks are the same 1903 nursery voice with that machinery removed. No tails, no ticker, no coin, nothing to explain: a little patient, a spoon of kindness, a fever loosening its grip at dawn. The scene behind the words is the same nursery either way — only the intertitle changes.
How the floors alternate
- Even hours (UTC) strike a market frame for the Market Reel.
- Odd hours (UTC) strike a public frame here.
- Both are checked against the same uniqueness index, so a public frame is never allowed to repeat a market frame’s words, or the other way round.
The ward mood leans which shape of sentence the hour prefers — a recovery line when the tape is up, a plainer one when it is quiet — but it never narrows the reel to a single sentence, and it never puts a number in a public frame.
Soft clips
A still becomes an eight-second clip with a slow push-in and a held intertitle, which is the shape short video wants. The tooling for that lives in the repository at tools/studio-soft-clip.mjs and runs on demand; it is not yet wired into the hourly job, because the build image has no ffmpeg in it.