Video: Lament for a Lost Bird, CGI. 90-second clip from Birdsong project in progress. 

Birdsong is a proposed installation where visitors will hear sounds, created with the help of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, that recreate the historic dawn chorus as it would have sounded a century ago, offering an auditory portal to a richer, more biodiverse past. A medium-scale video projection forms the heart of the installation which comes on every ten minutes. In it a camera tracks across a CGI meadow toward a photorealistic, digitally-rendered mouse. This artificial creature stands on a CGI Santa Barbara Island and sings a lament for the extinct Santa Barbara Song Sparrow, an original song written by the composer Garry Eister and performed by soprano Risa Larson as the voice of the mouse. The animation, directed by Duff and executed by CGI artist Sonya Sofiya Fayzieva, is at a crude level presently and we hope to fully realize it with the support of COLA.