I visited the Urban Lights installation outside the LACMA museum in Los Angeles. As I walked around it, I had the idea that I could do a mock-up of it in the software Motion. So, that’s what this is – basically, a challenge to myself to create something similar to the Urban Lights within my software. Just took a couple hours – couldn’t really find good-quality images of old lights, but didn’t look very hard either. In no way, did I try to be exact in matching the exact type of light or number, just wanted to very loosely and quickly set up some lights in a similar fashion using a replicator. The actual sculpture has more than 200 lights with 17 different types of light used.

Here’s some raw footage of the actual sculpture site (by Chris Burden, 2008):

There’s a very good multimedia presentation of this sculpture, which I downloaded at this page:
http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=record;id=161897;type=101

Cannon Beach, Oregon 2009

If you were to find yourself on a desert island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, you’re more likely to find a beach strewn with garbage than a pristeen paradise. Here, the movie Cast Away is re-edited to reflect the reality of the great garbage patch of the Pacific Ocean.

This narrative documentary follows my Grandpa and I on a journey across America. Against the backdrop of 19th and 21st century meta-history and North American geography, it places the life and travels of my Grandpa, a man of his times, in a bigger context. The trip takes us on a journey from my Grandpa’s ranching community in south Saskatchewan, Canada, across the border to Montana, and then on Amtrak trains through Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and finally back to Canada.
As editor and fellow traveler, I’ve done my best to make the film relevant for both my family and for a public audience. I hope the film might have some appeal to everyone from rail enthusiasts to grade school Social Studies teachers.

The film is 30 minutes long.

It was filmed with a Canon HV-20 camera. Various archival footage was taken from archive.org and youtube. The film was edited using Final Cut Studio.