Terra Montane

2025, 15-minute digital video

This fifteen-minute film was commissioned by the Sun Valley Museum of Art in conjunction with their SNOW SHOW: Winter Now exhibition and the 2025 World Cup Alpine Championships in Sun Valley. This cinematic tour explores some of the earth’s most dynamic terrains where geology, ice, and altitude collaborate to ceaselessly sculpt new landscapes. After an overture featuring an eighteenth-century maquette of Mont Blanc, the first half of the film explores landscapes that were photographed for photogrammetric visualizations where animated point clouds render the scenes ascending the heights of Cascade volcanoes. Following an interlude through an ice cave, the second half of the film explores the American epicenter of glacier-making in Alaska through point clouds pieced together from archival imagery shot over 15 years ago. The virtual cinematography tools developed by Glowbox reveal Nan Sheherd’s immersive insight that “a mountain has an inside.”