music links:
- Fleet Foxes ~ Mykonos
- Ben Howard ~ Under the Same Sun
- Iron & Wine ~ Boy With a Coin
- Horse Feathers ~ Curs in the Weeds
- Fleet Foxes ~ Helplessness Blues
Finally had a chance to pull this together. It’s pretty cool to see the whole thing – 3000 miles and four days of driving compressed into about 21 minutes. Any faster and everything becomes a blur. Any slower and it starts to feel like doing the drive all over again. If your web connection will support it, you’ll definitely want to watch it large in HD. Go to the Youtube Link if you have to.
It’s a big country, with much to see. The camera rig and software used to record the trip preserved each frame as a full resolution photo on the iPhone – over 21,000 of them. Many, many individually are simply stunning. Those will fly by like the others, flashing on the screen for 1/12 of a second.
It’s amazing how sensitive memory is to vision. Almost four months later all but the most generic late night road images still bring back immediate recall of that part of the trip. Played at speed in sequence, some significant events go by so fast they are all but invisible – the train wreck, for instance. Others – the ground blizzard in Wyoming, the dust storm in Oregon with tumbleweeds darting across the road – are more prolonged, but far more brief and beautiful than treacherous. The smooth animation belies hours of white knuckle driving endured in real time.
I confess to cheating a bit. To have mercy on less engaged viewers, the long, grey, monotonous drive through winter-dismal Missouri has been accelerated by 400%. Trust me, this is a good thing. Sorry, Missouri. Most of the night driving has been sped up, as well. Otherwise, it’s all here.
Enjoy.