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Our final project (save for this site) was to produce a minute-long digital movie in QuickTime format using Adobe Premiere 5.1 as the authoring tool.

The content of the piece below was inspired by W.B. Yeats' poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus. A sense of profound yet playful mystery hallmarks the poem, which the movie attempts to convey visually by incorporating a collage of offbeat -- sometimes haunting, sometimes silly -- images. Two key passages from the poem begin the sequence. The text of the first passage glides into view over the background photo of the Pleiades constellation (taken by the Hubble telescope), illustrating the poem's "moth-like stars." The second hovers over an ancient mound, Silbury Hill in England (click here for the full-size photo). Panpipes provide a haunting musical score in this and the following segments.

In the next scene, Yeats' poetic image of the "silver trout" transforms itself into a flying saucer. Leading into the sequence, David Duchovny's Fox Mulder from an episode of The X Files television series laments, "I want to believe." A brief series of daytime stills depicting a flock of birds scattering from a corn field follows, as well as another clip of birds scattering into the night. The daylight-bird stills were taken from the trailer for the upcoming movie, Signs, while the nighttime clip originates with the trailer for The Mothman Prophecies.

The piece ends with another series of stills from the Signs trailer -- a crop circle catching on fire -- and then a brief shot of the contemplative Jodi Foster playing the astronomer who discovers extraterrestrial life in the movie Contact.

Technical details. The video aspect of this movie file uses Cinepak compression with a 160x120 pixel display field at 15 frames per second. The audio aspect is set to 22 KHz, 8 bit mono uncompressed. You will need the QuickTime plug-in to view this movie.

Inspired by the W.B. Yeats poem

Note: The above QuickTime movie file is 7 MB in size and may take up to 30 minutes to download over a slow connection.

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