Just Drive On By…
A series of videos done 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 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 is 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).
Lone Star
More a Fly-By than a Drive-By, but never mind… a video shot in 2023 around the old (but still active) Lone Star concrete plant in West Oakland. Like thousands of other people, I’ve driven past this strange-looking and seemingly on-the-verge-of-decrepit building regularly over the decades, and always wanted to capture how it both fits into and stands out from its industrial surroundings. I used the beautiful Billy Strayhorn composition “Blood Count” (as performed by Duke Ellington) for the soundtrack — I’ve had that tune rattling around in my mind for a long time waiting for something like this.
Bridge
Yes, it should be titled “Drive-By: Bridge”, but oh well. Back when the old Oakland side of the Bay Bridge was about to be replaced, I wanted to capture the hypnotic effect of driving through the old 1930’s girder-based section before it disappeared, so early one Sunday morning I attached a GoPro to my windshield, and drove steadily in the center lane across the entire bridge with the camera running. The San Francisco side looked kinda cool too, so I left it in, and used a soundtrack Oakland’s Stephen M. Duffy gave me, and this is the result…
Drive-By: Desert
An attempt to make a video about human settlement and the Mojave, but also to capture some of the feeling of driving through the desert. Much of it was done using a really primitive 720p 30fps DSLR hanging off one of my Subaru’s side windows. It’s backed by Mahler’s Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (from his Das Lied Von Der Erde); I get criticized a lot for that soundtrack, but I always knew from long before I shot the video itself that I’d be using it — what could be more appropriate than a florid stretch of Western Art Music?
Drive-By: Oilfield
An oilfield video done in the greater Bakersfield region. Several years after doing my Pumpjack video, I wanted to show people how surreal and weird the sprawling oilfields off either side of California State Route 33 and nearby places are. So I did my Drive-By thing and hung the cheap Nikon DSLR off the side window of my Subaru, and drove very slowly along the oilfield highways and roads when there was a suitable break in the traffic (which might take ten minutes to happen). Soundtrack by Oakland’s Stephen M. Duffy.
Drive-By: Yucca Forest
One of the few desert videos here that’s simply a celebration of the desert itself, in this case of a Yucca (Joshua Tree) 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, 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 (yes, it’s an iPhone video, and no, it wasn’t done with a drone).
Drive-By: Port
I used to haunt the Port of Oakland. The container cranes and trains and trucks and the containers themselves stacked up everywhere just cried out to be videoed, so — as with Drive-By: Oilfield, above — I did the Drive-By Thing and drove very slowly through the Port whenever I could squeeze between the trucks. I got enough footage over a year or so to be able to combine it with a nicely compelling soundtrack from Stephen M. Duffy and this is the result. As with the oilfield videos, I’d love to redo this with better gear, but Port security is much better nowadays and it just isn’t going to happen…
Drive On By… (Wood Street)
Not really a conventional Drive-By video — more a futile and hastily-done riposte to all those Oakland boosters who go on about the exquisitely-prepared second world coffees and chai lattes and world-beating hipster food and affected clothing stores the city likes to think of as symbolizing itself. This is just one of the homeless shanty towns or camps in plain sight in Oakland that might better symbolize the city. Hundreds of Oaklanders live like this (not through choice); tens of thousands of Californians do as well, in this self-proclaimed Most Progressive Of All Possible States. And yes, there’s no soundtrack. If there were, it’d probably be mostly just me ranting…