The original stills (after JPEG compression) can be retrieved by clicking on the corresponding thumbnail.
Maria and Tony's competition entry was an MPEG movie (135KB) totaling 27 frames. (Note: The MPEG encoding is responsible for glitches in the movie; the individual frames do not contain stray polygons or any other visual artifacts.) The movie shows the earth moving down a bowling alley lane, hitting a pin, which in turn proceeds to hit another one. Shown below are thumbnails of movie frames 1, 10, 19, and 27, while the image above is a still rendering depicting in detail the objects used in the animation.
Maria and Tony designed their own keyframe animation system, which they used to move and rotate the objects over time while rendering with motion blur. Even though only the properties of objects can be changed using their animation system, Maria and Tony managed to make the earth disappear when it reaches the end of the alley by placing a big black box there!
The texture of the bowling alley lane is a solid texture generated by Ken Perlin's turbulence function, while the ball's texture is a simple spherical map of the globe. Also, a bump map is applied on the pin. Finally, a point light at the end of the alley makes the pins (and approaching earth) appear shinier.