Beverly Peterson
Artist

Thirty years ago my husband, painter Farrell Brickhouse, and I brought the foster child we were adopting, 11-year-old Andre Bernard, to our cabin deep in the woods of Upstate New York. After hiking and swimming, we spent the evening stargazing and making shadow puppets while Farrell read Robinson Crusoe aloud. Andre began writing furiously in his notebook. Farrell stopped to ask what was so important. Andre read aloud: "I was born from a raindrop of heavenly water. And out of the mist came a tiny egg and out of that egg came a whole river of enchanted fish..." Farrell looked at Andre and said: "You keep writing and I'll keep reading." Andre's poem, Raindrop, is the foundation of this experimental film. I met Andre and his Mom while making video diaries for homeless mothers with AIDS. RAINDROP: Andre's Secret Project returns to the night in the cabin. A child's notebook pours out the letters of his poem onto a hand-built set where scale shifts and inside and outside blur, that includes dollhouses, life-sized branches and a chair suspended from the ceiling. Through it moves Andre's own voice, reconstructed through AI from The Andre Show, my 1997 PBS video diary. His poem shares a child's view of creation, sickness, belief, healing, transformation, and the moment "the earth was being reborn," written just months before he died

• Direction: Beverly Peterson

• Poem: Andre Bernard

• Andre's voice: AI-reconstructed from Peterson's 1997 video diary, The Andre Show PBS (ElevenLabs)

• AI animation: Kaiber AI

• Tools: Madmapper, ElevenLabs, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Photoshop

• Duration: 3:18

• Year: 2025​​