Videos taken with my favourite camera…
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One Minute Dream (Lone Star)
Go to video page…: One Minute Dream (Lone Star)One Minute Dream, video and soundtrack by Hamish Reid. West Oakland, September 2024. Another quick-and-dirty iPhone video morsel done while I worked on something else…
Made from outtakes from the earlier Lone Star sessions, manipulated slightly, and reusing bits of old soundtrack work I’ve used elsewhere but thought sort of worked here as well. Intended to be one of many One Minute Dreams, I just haven’t got around to the others yet.
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The Next Station Is Embarcadero
Go to video page…: The Next Station Is EmbarcaderoThe Next Station Is Embarcadero, a video by Hamish Reid. West Oakland, July 2024: a quick-and-dirty iPhone video morsel while I worked on other things.
Just an iPhone pressed against the window of a BART train between West Oakland and Embarcadero (San Francisco) stations, with no particular intentions in mind. I lucked out with the weather (the cloudy sky and subdued high-saturation light in particular) and the unusually slow speed of the train… and the even more unusually clean(ish) window. I know the area shown in the video — an always-struggling uneasy mixture of industry and residential blocks — from decades of criss-crossing it on a bike and having friends and acquaintances in the neighbourhood (lately getting worried about gentrification even here, though).
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Drive-by: Yucca Forest
Go to video page…: Drive-by: Yucca ForestDrive-by: Yucca Forest; video by Hamish Reid, soundtrack by Roxann Spikula. 2016: deep in my fave Joshua tree forest (a forest I’ve been visiting for a couple of decades now), somewhere in Death Valley National Park.
One of the few desert videos here that’s simply a celebration of the desert itself, in this case of a Joshua Tree (Yucca) forest in Death Valley National Park, a forest that’s a bit off the beaten track and that I try to visit every year. The video is made by the soundtrack, adapted from a piece by local musician (and friend) Roxann Spikula, who also drove my Subaru along the desert tracks here while I sat on top of it holding my iPhone taking the raw video footage with a little Ikan stabilizer (yes, it’s an iPhone video, and no, it wasn’t done with a drone).
Austere musical Greenland meets warm spiky desert visuals.
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Sleep (The Alabama Hills)
Go to video page…: Sleep (The Alabama Hills)Sleep (The Alabama Hills): a video by Hamish Reid. This 2016 video is what happens when you stroll around the Alabama Hills (near Lone Pine, California) with an iPhone shortly after having watched Picnic At Hanging Rock… somehow a nice friendly part of the world that I know so well is actually made to look a little sinister. Oh well.
It started out as a test of my then-new little Ikan stabiliser for my iPhone; it was the first time I’d used the combination of iPhone and stabiliser, and the footage wasn’t really intended to be used for anything much, but here it is. The Ikan works a charm, if a little flakily at times, and the iPhone’s video is usually pretty reasonable, or at least acceptable (it’s a lot easier than using either my D800 or FS700 for video).
What transformed this into a real video was using dark ambient noise band Relay For Death’s “Sleep” as the audio bed (with their permission, of course) — it put shape and shade to the previously-shapeless mass, and it all coalesced (congealed?) into what you see (or don’t see) here. That’s often the case with my videos — it’s the soundtrack that’s primary, that determines so much else about the pacing, the cutting, and the atmosphere. It wasn’t meant to be quite so claustrophobic and sinister, but I couldn’t help myself really, and, hell, it was just a test. A test that’s lived on well past its use-by date, but never mind — I still enjoy watching it, and people seem somewhat amused by the ending if they’re paying attention.