Like Watching Paint Dry
It all started with Bakersfield and pumpjacks… a fascination or obsession with the way machines move through and interact with their natural environment, the way oilfield pumpjacks seem eternally stuck moving in place, the mixture of grace and bumbling jerkiness, the way trains in the desert so often seem almost a natural part of the desert world (at least compared to cars and trucks).
Pumpjack
The original Machine Age video, and still by far the most popular of my videos (more than 300,000 views on Youtube). Done with a cheap old 1440i Sony DV prosumer tape unit (and a bit of trespassing) back in the Paleolithic era in the greater Bakersfield (California) area, it’s definitely one of my fave videos. People sometimes complain that the soundtrack I cobbled together isn’t sync’d or that it’s monotonous, but hey, that’s kind of the point, right? I’d love to redo both this and Drive-By: Oilfield (below) again with better gear now, but they’re much more savvy about oilfield security nowadays, and I’d never be allowed.
Drive-by: Oilfield
Another oilfield video done in the greater Bakersfield region. Several years after Pumpjack (above), I wanted to show people how surreal and weird the extensive oilfields off either side of California State Route 33 and nearby places are, so I hung a cheap Nikon DSLR (720p!) off the side window of my Subaru, and drove very slowly along the roads when there was a suitable break in the traffic (which might take ten minutes to happen). No, I didn’t slow any part of this video down — it’s all been done at 30fps on that cheap DSLR’s video (and it really shows). Soundtrack by Oakland’s Stephen M. Duffy.
Pacific Champ
MV Pacific Champ departs The Port of Oakland’s Schnitzer Steel to a soundtrack by Oakland’s Handsome Poets (© Duffy / Ward, by permission).
Up and Down: North Berkeley BART Station
I took San Francisco Bay Area’s BART to work every day for a couple of decades (I still use it every week). The geometries, the colors, the movements, the crowding, the noise… it could be annoying and overwhelming, or intriguing and mesmerizing, and sometimes even relaxing (I’m like that), but it was always mechanical. So I used my iPhone over several months to furtively capture little bits of the experience of going through a single station — North Berkeley — and recorded a bunch of found sounds in the station for the soundtrack. And yes, it was difficult finding times when the place wasn’t crowded — some of this was done at 6am.
Drive-By: Port
Another place I used to haunt is 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 hung a small Nikon DSLR in 720P video mode off the side window of my Subaru 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…
One Train: V
It’s just a silent video of a long train moving through the Mojave Desert’s Afton Canyon late one afternoon, right? I have this … thing … about trains in the desert that will probably get explored in more detail elsewhere, but here’s a sampler for The Machine Age.