I turned my life into a city you can walk: building World 001

A CV lists what you did. It doesn't show how you got there, and that's the part a client is really trying to judge: will this person keep showing up when the work gets hard? So I built World 001: my story as a painted London you can walk through on chaseintech.com. What it is World 001 is a single, depth-mapped painting of London at dusk. The camera drifts across it with real parallax. Hover anywhere and places light up. Click one and the camera flies you to that stop, where a short card tells that part of the story in my own words. There are ten stops, from the boxing ring and the run club to the reselling shelves, the lecture halls and the glass house where I build AI agents. It ends at first light. It runs in the browser on desktop and phone, with no app to install. Why a city Each part of the painting stands for something real. Amateur boxing taught me to train when I didn't feel like it. The 5 a.m. run club taught me consistency. Flipping sneakers paid for the next step and taught me to test against a real market. University and the late nights teaching myself to build AI turned that into engineering. Every skill I sell now started in one of those places, so it made sense to put them on one map. The short To launch it, I cut a 42-second vertical short. The rule was simple: every painted stop opens onto the real footage behind it. The hook is four real moments in about three seconds: gloves into a heavy bag, my sneaker wall, my agent designs on the monitor, and a jet ski. The first words are on screen from frame one. Real clips open out of the painting through a circle reveal, under a small "REAL" viewfinder, so you always know which is the painting and which is my life. It's cut at 60 fps in a motion kit I built in code (HyperFrames), with the ChaseInTech intro, flash cuts and outro. My phone clips are 30 fps originals, so each frame is held for two: nothing is interpolated. The voice is mine, recorded in one take in Calliope, my local voice studio. It splits the take into lines, and I picked the best read of each. No cloned or synthetic voice. The music is original, generated in code, and sits low under the voice. What I learned The first three seconds decide everything. My first cut opened on a logo sting. It looked fine, but nobody stays for a logo. Opening on real motion and a person, with the words already on screen, is the whole game. Real footage beats renders. The painted city is the hook, but the phone clips are what make it believable. Covers matter on every platform. Some let you upload a thumbnail and some only take a frame from the video, so the cover now sits in the first frame too. Walk it yourself: https://chaseintech.com I'm John Idowu. I trade as ChaseInTech, an AI engineer in London, building software, AI agents and automation for small businesses.