Cleaning Day

The Great Falls are switched off for their weekly cleaning. A crew in yellow waders scrubs the rock, washes the power plant windows and turns the valve at eight. Nobody is surprised. That's the rule.

Plates

Six images from a morning off

Closed for cleaning

“Back on at eight.”

The Great Falls with the water off: a crew in yellow waders and orange vests sweeping the dry basalt lip, a ladder against the rock face

Switched off

A worker in yellow waders blows autumn leaves off the dry edge of the falls into the gorge

III

The leaf blower

The old brick hydroelectric plant with its channel drained, workers scrubbing the rock bed and washing the tall arched windows from ladders

The power plant

“The channel is empty by seven.”

Two workers in a red brick valve house heave on a big brass wheel valve beneath a wall clock

Eight o'clock

The falls running again, a push broom and an orange vest left hanging on the black railing

Back on

“Nobody is surprised.”

How it was made

A waterfall, switched off

Every scene starts from my own photographs and 360 video of the Great Falls, shot on an overcast Saturday morning in October and reframed by hand. The crew, the sign, the drained channel and the valve house clock are made with AI, then chosen and edited by hand. The shot where the water comes back is the real falls, with their real sound.

The place is real: the Great Falls of the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jersey, 77 feet high, the reason the city exists, and now a national historical park. The hydroelectric plant at the foot of the falls is real too. Nobody cleans the falls. It is a fiction and an imagining, from a real place.

Photographs, 360 video, story & edit — Erik, Skypanther Studios

Images — GPT Image 2.5 via Higgsfield

Motion — Kling 3.0 via Higgsfield

Score & sound — ElevenLabs

Edit — assembled by hand

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Fiction told in real places · images and score made with AI

skypantherstudios.com