Sky Islands: a time travel in the Andes Mountains is a 13:58 minute film that integrates 3D animation, time-lapse photography, and video to envision one ecological chapter of the Northern Anden Mountains' history in South America. In the times we are living in today, anthropogenic effects and global warming are affecting not only our human species but also the whole species and inhabitants on Earth. This film seeks to visualize how an extraordinary ecosystem, a refuge of unique diversification, and a hotspot of biodiversity, called Paramo, took at least two million years of evolution. This visualization opens the door to travel from the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene as a first step toward opening minds of its importance, and to implant a concern and post a question: are we still on time to avoid losing more than two million years of evolution of an extraordinary ecosystem in the Planet Earth?
The film results from an Arts-Science collaboration between the environmental visual artist and Biologist Catalina Giraldo as an MA student at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, and the scientists dr. Suzette Flantua and prof. dr. Henry Hooghiemstra from the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED), Science Park, University of Amsterdam.
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