Birds & Batteries frontman Mike Sempert created the video for recent single "Panorama" (off their third full-length, Panorama) from Super 8 mm footage filmed by a group of unknown twenty-somethings traveling through what appears to be the American Southwest. Even though the footage was captured in the early part of the decade, the medium of choice lends the film the bleached, grainy look of a decades-old home movie. All the sweeping shots out of plane windows and moving cars — plus the old standby "spin-in-a-circle-while-filming" — are great visual complements to the song's expansive production. Fly-eye views (pro tip: compound eyes are the best at seeing wide-angle perspective), sudden bursts of light, and other visual embellishments reimagine the landscape throughout the video, adding structure and a kind of narrator's perspective to the casual footage. Taken as a complete composition, the video's a great vehicle to convey both the song's swooning nostalgia and anxiousness to see what waits at the horizon.
