Drive-By Videos

The world seen from a car…

A series of videos done (mostly) from my car. The idea is to try to give the effect of movement through a landscape (desert or urban), and to keep that viewpoint moving smoothly as much as possible — in other words, to replicate in miniature some of the sensation of driving through the desert or wherever. But also to (maybe) pack a slight punch while doing so. People sometimes ask if I’ve slowed the videos down at all — no, in almost all cases here the video is being shown at the same speed it was taken.

What I typically do with these things is hang a small DSLR camera or my iPhone off my car (usually on one of the side windows) and wait for a decent break in traffic, then drive very slowly for as long as I can with the camera rolling on auto and me watching like a hawk for traffic. If I’m lucky I might get a minute’s raw bumpy footage this way before having to pull over or speed up. I know there are better ways of doing this nowadays, but back when I started doing this, 30fps 720p was all I had, and I just had to go with that (and it really shows — I’d redo a lot of these if I could, but things like oilfield or port security are much savvier nowadays and it’s a lot harder to do). At least one of the videos also (inevitably) uses a GoPro, but I don’t like using GoPros for this sort of application because I prefer a narrower field of view than is usually available on them even on the narrowest FOV settings (they’re great for sports stuff and other non-arty videos I don’t put up here, though).