Now or Never Cursor-Tracked Panther
Move your cursor and the panther turns his head to follow it left, centre, right. Sit still and he starts looking around on his own.
There's no 3D model and no WebGL behind it. It's a single 10-second video, paused, with currentTime driven by mouse position on every animation frame. Two details are what make it feel alive rather than broken:
1. The clip was re-encoded so every frame is a keyframe. The original had 4 keyframes across 300 frames, so each seek had to decode from up to 2.5s back and the scrub stuttered badly.
2. Only frames 110–182 are mapped to the cursor. The rest of the timeline is two long static holds the head turns, then sits still for ~3 seconds. Mapping the full 10s meant most of the screen did nothing.
The video plane also leans toward the pointer in 3D while the headline drifts against it, which reads as depth instead of a flat image.
Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No framework, no build step, no dependencies one file.
