We slowly creep away from a gilded portrait of Kim Jong-il’s charming but sinister puppet character from Team America: World Police.

This is a rather beautiful shot, because I used some pearlescent paint on the bunker walls and bombarded the scene with photons from a 365 nm wavelength black light. I slid that light along a yardstick in order to cast shadows through an as-yet-unseen cage.

And what we really don’t yet grasp is why the portrait is slowly mirroring upon itself to become an oddly symmetrical face. This illusion is revealed in the next shot, but the optical setup here had to be very precise for this to work.