Eras

What we ran

Four bins, 84 takes declared. Eighty-three are in the data; one of the twenty anachronisms didn't make it, and this report covers the nineteen that did.

Bin one is the experiment: four everyday scenes — a busy street market, a wedding, a football match, a family kitchen — run through nine eras of film, from A 1901 hand-cranked actuality film to A 2020 vertical phone video. Same scene noun every time. Only the era changes.

Bin two asks for the future directly: Documentary footage from the year 2035 through 2200, plus ten thousand years out, across the same four scenes. Bin three is the control — four takes of the past imagining the future. Bin four is twenty collisions: two eras in one frame.

Every take ran on auto aspect. Nobody set a frame shape.

Seventy-seven takes were pulled apart frame by frame with ffmpeg; all 83 were read on the sheet.

What happened

The frame shape is period language, and it set it itself. Every take from 1901 through 2004 came out 1088×800 — roughly Academy. The 2013 vlog row switched to 1280×704, sixteen by nine. The 2020 row went to 704×1280, vertical. Nobody asked for any of that. The best one is 027, the 2004 flip-phone football match: it alone broke ranks in its own row and rendered vertical, because a man filming a match on a flip phone holds it upright. That is not a grade. That is the model reasoning about the object doing the recording.

Colour is dated correctly until 1969, then it slips. Mean chroma, sampled one frame a second: the 1929 row sits at 0.3–2.8 — monochrome. The 1955 Technicolor row sits at 9.6–14.7 — colour. The 1969 row splits down the middle. Market 7.1 and kitchen 11.3 are in colour; wedding 014 at 0.4 and football 015 at 0.4 are black and white. Same era token, same prompt stem, and half the row lands in the wrong decade — US network broadcast had been fully colour for three years by 1969. The 1901 row has the same inconsistency in miniature: 001 came out sepia-toned at 10.7 while its three siblings sit at 0.5. The rule it has learned is "old means grey", and it applies it by feel.

1A 1929 newsreel with title cards of a football match.

Title cards are the proof that the period cues go deeper than the surface. A 1929 newsreel with title cards produced actual intertitles on all four takes, in period type, correctly spelled: MARKET DAY (005), THE WEDDING OF THE SEASON (006), FOOTBALL THRILLS! (007), A MORNING IN THE FAMILY KITCHEN (008). 007 also closes on THE END. These are the only takes in the bin with real internal cuts — one or two each, against zero for the entire 1955, 1969 and 1996 rows. Ten seconds, and it built a card, a cut, a body shot and an end card. The era changed the edit.

Production design is the strongest axis by a distance. Read the kitchen column straight down: 004 cast-iron range, pot rail, stoneware crock, bare boards. 008 skirted farmhouse sink, round-shouldered icebox, Windsor chairs, oilcloth check. 012 mint cabinets, red-and-white lino, chrome dinette. 016 avocado units, formica table, short-sleeve shirt and tie. 020 oak cabinets, dishwasher, moustache, plaid. 024 canister set, cordless wall phone, and a FAMILY TIME / Quick Kitchen Snacks lower third burned in. 018 and 022 carry chyrons too, and 022 adds a COMMUNITY CABLE 12 channel bug in the corner. It is not reaching for a look. It is dressing a set.

Where it collapses is the recent end, not the deep past. 028 (2004), 032 (2013) and 036 (2020) are the same kitchen with the same wardrobe. 020 (1987) and 032 (2013) share the oak-cabinet set outright — the only things separating them are the grade and a moustache. Past 1996 the reliable difference is the container: frame shape and compression. "Old" is heavily documented. "Fairly recently" is not, and it has nothing specific to say about it.

One semantic drift worth knowing about. 019, A 1987 local news segment of a football match, returned American football — helmets, shoulder pads — alone in a column of nine soccer matches. The era cue was American enough to rewrite the noun.

A future date does nothing at all. 037 (2035) is a 2025 street market with a delivery drone in it. 053 (2200) is a present-day covered market with water bottles on a scale. 056 (2200, kitchen) is a contemporary dining table. Every future-reading element in this bin is a thing the prompt named. Where the prompt names an object or a mechanism, it lands cleanly: 042's volumetric bride standing translucent at the altar in front of a full congregation, 044's ceiling-mounted arms plating dinner, 055's white humanoid striker beside a human keeper. Where the prompt names physics, it doesn't: 051 asks for low gravity and a ball that simply does not come down and returns an ordinary stadium on an ordinary evening; 043's half the stadium crowd is physically present and half is projected returns a normal crowd. At ten thousand years it either commits — 057's non-human traders under ribbed, right-angle-free architecture — or empties out, as in 058 and 059, which are a dark bowl with a few glowing dots in it.

The retro-future control is the best bin on the board, and it isn't close. It renders the medium of the prediction, not just its content. 061 moves as a chromolithograph postcard: flat inked colour, a liveried mechanical servant, a brass pneumatic tube feeding into a drawing room, a winged omnibus riding on carriage wheels. 062 is a black-and-white newsreel of a streamline-moderne skyline, a moving pavement carrying identical men in hats and overcoats, and an atomic oven. 063 is beige CRTs on every desk, a wire-frame visor, and the information superhighway as a literal blue grid road — with a loading bar sitting in frame. 064 is brushed aluminium, a white rounded robot, solar towers in clean desert. These are also the most heavily cut takes on the board — five cuts in 061, four in 062. It treats a retro-future as an edited film. It treats 2200 as a shot.

1A 1900 illustrated postcard series come to life, depicting how Victorians imagined the year 2000. Personal flying machines drift between ornate towers, mechanical servants in livery carry trays, pneumatic tubes deliver letters directly into drawing rooms. A gentleman steps aboard a winged omnibus, raises his hat to the camera — and the whole contraption sinks slowly and gently out of frame while he continues to raise his hat.

That is the finding underneath the whole bin. FLUX.3 has no picture of 2200. It has a very good picture of 1900's picture of 2000, because that one was drawn, printed and archived.

Anachronism commits, 17 out of 19. Both halves arrive at full quality far more often than not. 066 is a real Tokyo train car — straps, seat moquette, yellow tactile paving on the platform — with armoured samurai in it and commuters who never look up. 068 is a correct Apple Store, blond-wood tables, glass stair, blue shirts, and a Ming painter in a winged futou cap. 069 is a real IKEA showroom with a price tag on the grey sofa, and then the actual restaurant counter behind the meatballs. 075 is a data-centre cold aisle with containment doors and blue LED rows, monks kneeling on the raised floor tiles. 070 puts the axe in the security tray. The beats land.

1A Neanderthal family moves through an IKEA showroom, testing sofas with genuine appreciation and examining a flat-pack instruction leaflet with deep concentration. They select a shelving unit, open the box on the showroom floor, and assemble it correctly and efficiently without ever looking at the instructions again. They stand back and regard it. Then they abandon it entirely and go and eat the meatballs.

The two that fail, fail the same way, and the interesting part is what drags. It is not the props — it is the photography. 078 starts with a correct modern 3D printer, glass window, duck visible inside; by the end the entire frame has been graded as an oil painting, brown varnish and Caravaggio key, with the print rig dressed in wood. 067's warehouse rave ends up as an empty grey hall with distant speakers and a single stage light, Victorians standing in a formal line like a curtain call — the modern half has evaporated. When one era swallows the other it is always the older one winning, and it takes the lens before it takes the set.

Notable takes

007 | 1929 newsreel · football match | Opens on FOOTBALL THRILLS!, closes on THE END. The era changed the edit, not the grade. 061 | 1900 imagines 2000 | Moves as a chromolithograph. It knows the medium of a prediction better than it knows any prediction. 027 | 2004 flip-phone · football match | Rendered vertical, alone in its row, because that's how you hold a flip phone. Nobody asked. 069 | Neanderthals in IKEA | Real showroom, real price tags, real restaurant counter, and Neanderthals at full quality in all of it. 051 | 2100 · football under low gravity | An ordinary stadium. It renders the future's objects, never its physics. 078 | Renaissance sculptors at a 3D print lab | The duck arrives, but by then the whole frame has become an oil painting.

1A 2004 flip-phone video of a football match.

What this means if you're prompting FLUX.3

Name the format, not the year. 1929 newsreel with title cards bought cards, cuts and an end card. 1969 on its own is a coin flip on whether you get colour.

Treat the frame shape as an output. On auto, words like flip-phone, vertical phone video and vlog will set your aspect ratio for you. That is usually what you want. If it isn't, set it explicitly.

Anything after about 1996 needs content, not a date. It will not invent 2013 for you — describe what's in the room.

For the future, prompt objects and mechanisms, never physics or a year. A delivery drone, a volumetric partner, a robot in goal all render. Low gravity does not, and 2200 on its own gets you today.

If you want a future that actually looks like one, borrow a past one. A 1930s newsreel confidently predicting life in 1980 is a far stronger visual instruction than any real date.

For collisions, pin the modern half's photography — name the camera, the light, the stock. Left alone, the older era takes the lens with it and you get a period painting with a printer in it.

1Two samurai in full armour ride a packed Tokyo subway car at rush hour, holding the overhead straps, swords sheathed and carefully angled to avoid the other commuters. Nobody looks up from their phones. At the next station the doors open and one samurai's scabbard is blocking them. Without a word, six commuters shuffle a precise half-step in unison to make room. The scabbard clears. The doors close. Nobody has acknowledged anything.

1Medieval monks in habits walk the cold aisles of a modern data centre carrying lanterns, copying rack labels and serial numbers into an illuminated manuscript with gold leaf and immense care. A rack ahead of them completes a scheduled reboot: a cascade of green lights runs up its full height with a rising hum. The monks fall to their knees as one. The senior monk begins, immediately, to write it down.