Turns out January in Chicago is not primetime film season and we were in the middle of filming for A Color Map of the Sun…  There was only one solution… REAV roadtrip! The crew set out for what became non-stop tear across the the country filming everything that we thought was fresh along the way without ever staying in one place for more than a few days.  Fueled by gas station hot dogs, sour cream cheddar ruffles and redbull we mounted up and hit the road.

The Long and lonely stretch of road between Chicago and California yeilded us some prime footage.  Windmill farms and oil refineries succeeded in making you feel like you were standing on the moon and they all got the lens turned on them as we blazed on through a nightmare snowstorm towards the coast.

San Francisco is one the most photographed cities in the world so going in we knew stock cityscapes weren’t going to cut it.  We were on a graffiti safari…as luck would have it we we met a local graffiti artist who let us tag along while he painted the town the way he thought it should look.  We relished the opportunity to show graffiti as a performance art, to often only the final product is appreciated.

REAV’s Creative Director David has been fascinated by combining motion graphics and the natural world. The Giant Sequoias in the Red Wood forest were the perfect place. A couple car batteries and tired crew members later we had captured what might be the only footage in existence of projection mapping on these ancient sentinels the emerald triangle.

Joshua Tree National park is heralded as being one of the darkest places on earth so we knew we had to spend a night there grabbing some  astrolapses for the project. We experimented with unnatural lighting techniques walking around the moon like terrain. in the morning we focused on the stark ruggedness of the geological features and bounced from rock pile to rock pile looking for lens flares and unusual formations.