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Short film · 2 min 38 s · sound on

Colour · The Moodna Viaduct, Salisbury Mills, New York

Moodna

A train crosses the Moodna Viaduct every morning. In this one, it stopped halfway across, and the circus got off. Nobody is surprised. That's the rule.

Plates

Six images from the morning

An old wooden circus train with gilt CIRCUS lettering stopped mid-span on the steel Moodna Viaduct above a green valley

I

The train stops

“It sets its brakes 190 feet above the valley.”

Clowns and roustabouts climbing down the lattice legs of the viaduct with ropes

II

Down the steel

An elephant lifted out of a circus car by a cluster of huge faded balloons, drifting over the treetops

III

The elephant

A red and cream striped circus tent rising in the meadow below the viaduct

IV

The tent

People walking across the grass toward the tent in the morning light, a man in a black work shirt nearest the camera

V

Townspeople

The empty circus train pulling off the viaduct at dusk, the tent lit in the field below

VI

Dusk

“One balloon stays behind in the lattice.”

How it was made

A real train, and then not

Every scene starts from my own photographs of the viaduct, taken from the ground and by drone that morning, including the real Metro-North train crossing in the first shot and the bare valley in the last. The train becomes the circus train in the first shot, and from there the images and motion are made with AI, then chosen and edited by hand.

The circus is invented. The place is real: the Erie Railroad built the Moodna Viaduct in 1906–1909, 3,200 feet long and 193 feet high, and trains still cross it every day. It is a fiction and an imagining, 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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Skypanther Studios

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

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