Michelle Schwartz

During the summer of 2007, my friend and I took a road trip across North America. She was going to be going to the University of British Columbia in the Fall and needed to move her stuff to Canada. I volunteered to help her drive there. We left Brooklyn, drove across the States on I-80, put her stuff into storage in Vancouver, and then drove down the West Coast, ending in Oakland, California.

I shot a huge number of videos and photographs on our trip. This was my first attempt to pare that massive amount of material down into one short movie. It was shot using a Canon Powershot SD-800, edited in iMovie HD 6, and compressed for YouTube using Final Cut Studio’s Compressor.

This is a movie I made of saints, angels, and various lawn ornamentation that can be found on lawns in Marine Park, Brooklyn. I love religious iconography and so I always found the Catholic lawn statues that litter the grass in yards all across New York City to be wonderful. I grew quite spoiled by New York and thus am always a bit surprised when I arrive in a city where everyone hasn’t bought their own personal Virgin Mary and built increasingly ornate shrines for her. I took these photos with my Digital Rebel and made them into a slide show with iMovie ‘08.

This was the very first movie I made. I had just gotten a new camera that I planned to use to document my upcoming road trip. I wanted to practice making a movie to get the idea of the kinds of shots I would need and how it would come together in iMovie. My friends were planning a trip to Coney Island as a birthday party, and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to make a short movie.

The footage was shot with a Canon Powershot SD-800 and edited with iMovie HD 6. Unfortunately, the master was lost in a hard drive crash, so the compressed version for YouTube is less than fantastic.

Music: “Cumbia En Do Menor” by Lito Barrientos y Su Orquesta