For the video of Kinthissa's leave-taking ceremony, please see www.lunival.com/farewell/.

The transition at 5m 36s is beautiful. It is a slow dissolve from one arrangement of people to the same people seen from a different angle. The background trees in the first clip look similar to the background trees in the second clip, but with different lighting (because of the changed angle of the sun) so at first glance it might seem as if nothing has moved but the lighting has subtly changed.

Having created the transition straightforwardly as the technical needs of the moment demanded, I was struck by how unexpectedly silky smooth the result looked. I watched it several times, to try to understand what made it work well.

Sometimes with this kind of transition, it happens that one person ends up in exactly the same spot on the screen (i.e. the same pixels) as they were to begin with, just rotated. The result can look strangely like a person updating their essence, coming to a new realization while the universe rotates around them. But in this case, there didn't seem to be anything like that happening.

Then I noticed something interesting:

it is the *pile of chalk* around which everything rotates! The pile stays on the same vertical line (think sagittal plane, or azimuth) throughout the transition. In the two frames below, pre and post transition, arranged vertically, the pile in the upper (before) clip is, remarkably precisely, on the same vertical line as the pile in the lower (after) clip.

OK perhaps this isn't world-shaking. But there is something uncannily beautiful about this transition and I'm trying, not very successfully so far, to elucidate it.

In that moment it looks as though the background lighting has changed and the universe has rotated around the mountain of chalk, and the viewer only slowly realizes.

The mountain is a brilliant white, almost luminous in the winter woodland. The chalk blazes. Thubten in red is the other colour highlight. The eye moves constantly between these two things, the monk and the chalk.

And the mountain is about to disappear. By the end of the video it has been returned to the earth, leaving the ground flat and clean.