Drive-by: Yucca Forest
Deep in my fave Joshua tree forest, somewhere in California’s Death Valley National Park…
I’ve been visiting the yucca (Joshua tree) forest featured in this video (direct Youtube link: https://youtu.be/dzDKxAQH_s4) for a couple of decades now; it’s probably the most extensive such forest I’ve seen, and depending on the time of the year, it can be stingingly hot and dry, or dusted with snow (I’ve experienced both). Either way, it’s a wonderful place of weirdly-shaped and starkly-beautiful Joshua trees in a harsh high desert environment. Despite the way it seems, it’s not quite in the middle of nowhere — it’s not too far off the beaten track, even though you have to take a rough dirt road to get there — but it’s not a place that gets many visitors, either, and I’d sort of like to keep it that way. So I’m usually a bit coy about exactly where it is.
I’ve been trying to capture the lush spiky beauty of these trees and the environment here for ever, and (of course) I have tons of still photos of the area, but I really wanted to do it as a video, with the camera moving smoothly through the forest looking forward and sideways as these beautiful trees passed by. It wasn’t until 2016 that I had the right combination of time (a week off in the desert) and gear (my iPhone 6s and a little Ikan stabiliser) to make a video work without huge amounts of effort and money. Realistically, I couldn’t have done this as easily or as well even five years ago — video technology marches that quickly, and (sometimes) I’m grateful for it.
The video probably looks like it was made with a drone, but it wasn’t (I don’t have one yet, despite contemplating getting one now for a while — if nothing else, I have serious reservations about how annoying they are to everyone around them). I used my iPhone on the Ikan stabiliser, which I held in front of me as I stood on the passenger seat of my Subaru with my head and body poking out of the open sun roof while Rox drove — slowly — down the dirt tracks you can sometimes see in the video. No post-production stabilisation or slowing down (etc.) was done — just basic editing to a timeline with FCP X. It’s just an iPhone video, after all.
I stole one of Rox’s pieces of music for the soundtrack and edited it down to size. When I first heard the original piece (which is quite a lot longer), I immediately thought “musical Greenland!”, and “this would make a great soundtrack!”. So this (for me, at least) is musical Greenland meets stark Mojave desert — an austere, spiky, stark, and flowing result.
The video’s part of my Drive-By series of videos on YouTube (and Vimeo, if you know where to find it…), all of them taken from a moving car in one way or another. And people always ask if I’ve slowed them down or smoothed them out in post — no, I just sometimes have to wait fifteen or twenty minutes for a break in the traffic so I can drive really slowly (usually around 5 MPH) along the road or highway with my camera attached a side window while I keep my eyes on the road and a paranoid lookout for vehicles approaching quickly from behind. Of course, there was no other traffic for this video, and I had someone else to do the driving this time, but it’s the same sort of process.
