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Pensacola Arches

"Pensacola Arches" runs Mezzanine Swimmers' warped, underground pop through a grinder of zero-budget DIY visual effects, coming out the other end no less psychedelic thanks to the shared sensibilities of director/animator Trash Panda QC and the musician. Videos and photos of past shows were mapped onto crude 3D models and reshot via a phone-based virtual camera app, then edited in a dream-like, intercut style, nodding to the time and causality-bending cuts of experimental narratives like Easy Rider and Spring Breakers. Mezzanine Swimmers is miniaturized, stylized, simplified, then dropped into a skewed reflection of nature that mirrors the idealism and distorted forms of the music.

"There's a sense of humanity deep in there, but it's been distorted, detached, and reshaped, coming together as something new, primal, and sonically deranged." -Dan Goldin, Post Trash

"This country-fried oddity is heightened by the neon psychedelia of Trash Panda QC’s video. I keep asking myself how the hell I ended up here, but the truth is, I really don’t want to leave." - Brad Rose, Foxy Digitalis

  • Peter Seligman
    Director
  • Mike Green
    Key Cast
    "Mezzanine Swimmers"
  • Mike Green
    Additional Cameras
  • Andrew Chadwick
    Additional Cameras
  • Sam Hadge
    Additional Cameras
  • MP Lockwood
    Additional Cameras
  • Project Type:
    Music Video
  • Genres:
    Music Video, Nature, Psychedelic, Sci-fi
  • Runtime:
    4 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    January 14, 2023
  • Production Budget:
    0 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital/Animation
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Peter Seligman

Trash Panda QC, aka Peter Seligman, is an electronic musician and visual artist, inspired by mutant collisions of techno, noise, and 90s rave, and the mixture of perfectly flawed video collage and CGI that often accompanied them. With a background in collage, procedural art, and graphic design, he has recently worked more with video, co-creating two music videos with with artist James J.A. Mercer for their noise collaboration enn{kdog, and developing further via covid quarantine era live stream shows which processed late-night YouTube ephemera into a textural mulch. "Pensacola Arches" expands on these past techniques while retaining a deliberate DIY messiness.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

This video grew out of conversations with Mezzanine Swimmers about how to shoot a music video remotely, using found footage in a modern CGI take on older video collage techniques. We realized that we had a shared mental image associated with this song and it was easy to agree that I would be placing Mike into this psychedelic version of nature. I also realized in the process of working that it was my reaction against clean, overly considered aesthetics and techniques I was seeing both in expensive Hollywood films and in the music world. I hope Pensacola Arches makes a case for keeping the rough edges, holding onto unformed dreams, and letting some life back in.