"This immersive, nearly uncategorisable new world represents a new apex for one of America’s most accomplished and awarded experimental animators, Portland-based Joanna Priestley.

While drawing inspiration from natural landscapes during Priestley’s time in Canada’s northern Yukon, North of Blue offers a dense multiverse of images and shifting focal points that explore the tension between two dimensional patterns both familiar and alien.

Conventional icons are deconstructed, creating shapes that spark a sense of connection and shared history, while scenes transmogrify from rhythmic explosions to sublime trance-inducing patterns.

North of Blue began in February 2012 when Priestley was filmmaker-in-residence at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture[4] in Dawson City, Yukon, near the Arctic Circle.

Major inspirations were the abstract paintings of Hilma af Klint (1862–1944, Sweden) and the mathematical and mystical elements of her compositions, which led to developing trance elements in North of Blue; and the abstract paintings of Piet Mondrian (1872–1944, Holland), one of Priestley's favorite artists, whose work influenced the palette and the grid structure of several scenes in the film.

Other influences included the work of pioneer abstract animators Mary Ellen Bute (1906–1983, USA), Oskar Fischinger (1900–1967, Germany/USA), and Jules Engel (1909–2003, Hungary/USA).

She described the process of making North of Blue as "deeply joyful" and said, "Every morning, as I arrived at my studio, I had this delicious, expansive feeling of being in a vast, wild landscape, like the Yukon, with all the time in the world to explore new territory and experiment with unfamiliar imagery."

Haggerty did sound design and music for three of Priestley's short films: Dew Line (2005), Relative Orbits (2004, documentary)[7] and Utopia Parkway (1997).