I've been working for three weeks now editing a new piece for the San Diego Studies. I'm reorganizing traffic on the 163 freeway by car color. I had no idea how many people drive grey/silver cars and how few drive cars with color. The vast majority are either grey, silver, black or white. It surprised me. It's a challenging piece to put together because of the numbers of cars but it's coming along. It's funny that it only took around three hours to shoot and will take a few hundred hours to edit.
I've found a companion while editing that I have never had before. Since these films have no dialog I can listen to audio books while I work. During this edit I've listened to Revolution 1989 by Victor Sebestyen, How Music Works by David Byrne, 1493 by Charles Mann and Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana. I've found that the better the book is the longer and faster I work. It's a massive improvement over Pandora or my iTunes collection, which I erased recently...on purpose.
Two Years Before the Mast has been of special interest to me since this work I'm doing is about San Diego and much of the book's account of a sailing expedition in the 1830's takes place in San Diego when it was just a bay and a Spanish precidio. I'm amazed by his accounts of Sandwich Islanders, Russians, Italians, Native Americans, Spaniards and Mexicans all interacting in a distant wilderness called California. If they could have only known what the real estate values would be...
Below is a sample of what the final video will look something like. 163 was the city's first freeway.
