The Wishing Well

A man explores the skeleton of a great glasshouse, finds a stone well on the lawn and tosses in a coin. Behind his back the garden comes home. Nobody is surprised. That's the rule.

Plates

Six images from the glasshouse

The bare iron ribs of the abandoned Lyndhurst greenhouse against an overcast sky, a man in a black vest walking toward them across the lawn

The skeleton

“No glass, no plants, no one.”

The man leans over a carved stone wellhead with cherubs and garlands and drops a coin in

The coin

A geyser of flowers erupts from the stone well and arcs across the lawn toward the greenhouse as the man walks away, not looking

III

The flowers

“He doesn't see it.”

Panes of glass fly back onto the iron ribs of the palm house roof while flowers pour in through the frame

The glass

The long glasshouse aisle filled with orchids and palms, gardeners in aprons at work, the man walking in

The aisle

The palm house fountain alive again, water arcing and goldfish in the basin under the restored dome

The fountain

“Then he walks out past it, and it all lets go.”

How it was made

A ruin, restored behind his back

This one is mostly real. The man is me, filmed on a 360 camera on a stick behind me and reframed afterward so it reads as a camera following. Every imagined shot begins on a real frame from that footage and morphs into a restored version of the same frame made with AI, so the geography, the light and the man stay the same while the garden comes back around him. The flowers, the glass, the gardeners and the fish are made with AI, then chosen and edited by hand.

The place is real: the greenhouse at Lyndhurst in Tarrytown, New York, rebuilt for Jay Gould by Lord & Burnham in 1881 after the first one burned, 390 feet long and one of the largest private conservatories in the country in its day. Its iron frame still stands on the lawn without its glass, and the carved stone well stands nearby. Nothing happens if you toss a coin in. 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

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