Short film · 1 min 50 s · sound on
Colour · With Erik's voice · Bear Mountain State Park, New York
Bear Mountain
At the top of Bear Mountain the viewers cost a quarter. With your own eyes you get the sunrise and the Hudson. Through the viewer, the sky is busy. Nobody is surprised. That's the rule.
Plates
Six looks through the viewer
I
At the viewer
“Twenty-five cents. Let's see.”
II
The zeppelin
III
The control tower
IV
The controller
“Those aren't birds.”
V
Heading south
VI
The mooring mast
“They finally used that mooring mast.”
How it was made
A quarter's worth
Every scene starts from my own photographs, taken on the summit and by drone at sunrise that morning, including the sunrise in the first shot and the view down the Hudson in the last. Through the viewer, the images and motion are made with AI, then chosen and edited by hand. The voice muttering at the viewer is mine.
The place is real. Perkins Memorial Tower stands on the summit of Bear Mountain, above the Hudson Highlands, and on a clear day you can see the Manhattan skyline from it. The Empire State Building's spire really was designed as a mooring mast for airships; none ever docked there. It is a fiction and an imagining, from a real place.
Photographs, story, voice & edit — Erik, Skypanther Studios
Images — GPT Image 2.5 via Higgsfield
Motion — Kling 3.0 via Higgsfield
Score & sound — ElevenLabs
Edit — assembled by hand
Fiction told in real places · images and score made with AI · narration by Erik
skypantherstudios.com