Killing Heat is a low budget amateur movie I auteured when living in Thailand. While I actually never got around to editing the film, Kenny Wang did that, the domain always lingered as an unfinished project. Also during the shooting we took roughly 3000 photos which I never got around to using for anything. Not even sure it got shared with anyone who were part of the production. Now that I’ve lost my Facebook account with accompanying friend list, I don’t know how I can ever reach out to any of them. Heck, at least two of the actors in Killing Heat have since died (both young and gone too early), and all of the financial backers have passed on due to old-age-related issues. That hit harder than I expected. So I finally decided it was time to do something with all those lost photos before they disappeared forever.
What became my main goal for killingheat.com was a gallery for those lost behind the scenes photos that no-one ever got to see. Unredacted, unedited and raw. But also mostly trash photos that should’ve been deleted…
Click here to see the Killing Heat BTS Gallery!
Without a doubt, I’m pretty much a fanboy when it comes to choosing products, platforms and programs. I was, and still kinda am, a Google Henchman. Gmail, Google Drive, Maps, Keep, Chrome, Pixel, list prolly goes on. I make hard changes to things I like, abandoning other ships, along with all reason. When I was introduced to Telegram in 2014 by KiAnDe I was amazed at this futuristic cloud saving feature. I could receive a file in a chat and have it available on both my mobile and desktop. Simultaneously. At the time I was using Messenger, Skype and WhatsApp. If I was to receive a file on either of those apps, I had to be there to accept it, and if I was on Skype on my phone when someone sent me a file, that file ended up on my phone. Never where I needed it, so I had to manually send it to my PC. That marked the beginning of a new fanboying change. A hard change. I left all other chat apps and embraced Telegram. Has it reduced my social circle? Probably. Anywho!
I started killingheat.com with the “help” of Grok. Because I like Grok. I like Elon Musk. I am a fanboy. And I really tried. Really really tried. Grok would dump new code, even though I asked it to only mention changes I had to make, while making ridiculous claims such as “Fixed — PhotoSwipe is back, fully working”. Didn’t work. Again and again. Maybe this would have been better for my learning curve, to have to figure it out myself, but I noticed that Grok kept rewriting all the code, making changes to parts we were not changing. While not crucial, it annoyed me.
My rusty old friend Lemon kept pushing me to use Claude Code. I took the code Grok gave me, fed it into Claude, explained the problem, and Claude just fucking fixed it. Like a glove! Easily impressed I got Claude Code for VSCode and let Claude read and edit files directly in my project… and good lord this is a mindblowing gamechanger. Claude improved on everything. My code. Groks code. My commenting. Sorting, organizing and cleaning. I felt like a Warlock shouting the forbidden words to create magic. Could this be the vibe they speak of?
The project has grown beyond what I intend to paste into this database, I will update this post once I got git and can link to or fetch from GitHub. Going forward, I assume all projects will way too many files to list here, so I’ll stick to posting individual code snippets I wanna save for posterity. Look, here’s one we did earlier: Arguing with Grok until PHP does what I want!
However, I’ll mention the other elements of this project that isn’t entirely code. I loved PhotoSwipe.js back in 2015, and it’s still a reactive and fluid experience, like how I want it to feel when I swipe through a gallery. Allegedly CSS can now solve what Masonry.js did for me, and while that may be… it while have to be for another project. We had organized the 3000 photos by day of shooting, and each day into three folders: Promo, BTS, and Off. To make the filenames readable without folders, I used PowerRename from PowerToys to name the files in this fashion: killing-heat_day-4_2008-07-02_dsc_9573. To make the gallery load fast, photos were converted to webp in thumbnails and full sized using XnConvert. Original files were 8gb, thumb and full only 3gb. Image degradation not that visible when viewing by phone. It’s not like anyone is using those images (other than to feed into an LLM), so original quality was not needed… but I did include them with a download button. Fancy feature, 90% for myself.
Killing Heat is an ever ongoing project, so I might add new functionality, photos, videos, links and etc to the site. Check the news modal on the site, or simply look to see if the version number has changed (located in footer).