Drift

At dawn a man climbs a dune he found by accident and follows footprints that the wind keeps erasing. Every trail leads to someone.

Plates

Six images from the dune

A man with a daypack climbs the knife-edge crest of a huge sand dune, his footprints behind him, in black and white

The climb

A woman wrapped in a shawl sits on the dune watching the sunrise as the man walks up beside her

The woman

“Each trail leads to a stranger.”

A photographer under a dark cloth with an old wooden view camera on a tripod on the dune

III

The photographer

An old man with a cane laughs as a boy slides down the face of the dune

The boy

The summit

“Every trail converges on the summit.”

A single line of footprints blows away behind a tiny figure walking off across the dunes

Erased

How it was made

Sand, in black and white

Big Dune rises out of the Amargosa Valley in Nevada, a few miles off the highway. My black-and-white photographs of it set the look of the film, and the dunes you see are those photographs. The man is me, built from reference photographs so he would hold from shot to shot.

The images and motion are made with AI, then chosen and edited by hand. The score and the wind were made for the film. It is a fiction, from a real place.

Photographs, 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