This is the first teaser from the 16mm footage we took during the trip. This is probably my favorite shot out of all four reels… the speed and feel to it is very beautiful.
All the 16 was shot with the intention of acting as a “memory” for Larry. I just wish I had more than the 15 minutes I have - it intercuts very powerfully next to the HD footage.
This was one of the rare days that the wind didn’t blow directly into Larry’s face… he could really fly when he wasn’t the only object in the way of the wind ripping across miles of field…
I love this part of the country - the big sky, the endless green. It’s all so flat and boring and unchanging… but something about it really eats away at you after a trip.
This was the last time I laid in the grass. My head closest to a tree, my feet pointing towards the river. Watching the leaves dance back and forth in the wind. Enjoying the cloudless blue sky. The warm sun burning up the cotton in the air.
We were still in Glacier Park, Montana. One of the most heartbreakingly beautiful places I’ve ever seen…
This is Larry. This is somewhere between point A and point B. Where ever it is… I miss it. I miss kneeling on-top of the van, working the crane, watching Larry push through the wind. Knowing that every mile meant something to him… something people wouldn’t see passing by in their cars. Something subtle.
I believe Olivier shot this with the SGPro 35 Kit and the crew’s FX1… we had Amanda’s 300 zoom lens mounted (which was a lot of fun to film with).
We waited at the highest switch-back in Cascades National Park for Larry to pass and ride down into the valley. We took a lot of footage from this ledge, it was a very beautiful spot to spend an hour.
Amanda was hoping our 2nd teaser would be a clip from an interview we just transcribed, but I had this as a backup, and she hadn’t gotten a chance to come over and tell me which section she wanted.
Amanda and I decided we have so much extra footage floating around the timeline, that it would be fun for us to randomly pick 20 seconds here, 30 seconds there and post it on a consistent basis.
This first teaser is just Larry cruising along some road… somewhere *shrug* I’m too lazy to look it up :) but it’s pretty where-ever it is.
I’ve mainly been using instrumental music for these teasers - but to be honest, I’ve always wanted to use music more in line with this teaser.
If I can help it, at least half of the soundtrack will be music you’re used to hearing in these teasers, and the other half will be more… old, lonely, love-related. There’s a good reason for that - but one I’ll save for the film.
Until then - here’s a shot of Larry pushing slowly back against the winds in ND… alone on the road with nothing left to do but think about everything his life has been, and everything he wants it to be.
Maybe someone better with words could explain why it is abandoned houses always feel so fascinating when on the road.
I used to spend hours in them on my first bike trip… Tim and I would drag our bikes off the road, make lunch while sitting on a dirty, glass-covered floor. I would poke through old dressers, look for things that used to be important to someone. Baseball cards. Magazines with notes scribbled on the margins.
It was late when Larry came across this old farm-house – he stopped, took a few pictures, wandered around the back and peaked inside… but there wasn’t enough light to really find your way around.
He was only there a few minutes, and then he was back on his bike… I wondered when I was filming this when the last time anyone payed any attention to this empty home.
So, people have been asking me to post a FToM teaser that had a little bit of dialog in it for a while now. And I don’t really have an excuse as to what took me so long to actually picking one out.
But, I have to give Erica some credit here… I had yet *another* quiet biking shot picked out and ready to go and she strong-armed me into saving that for another time and picking out something “different”.
This group was one of the first people Larry ran into after having to say goodbye to his best-friend Jay earlier this morning. I know it must have been hard on Larry to carry on as if nothing was wrong or out-of-place.
This was taken in Glacier Park Montana – it poured there for about two days.
At this point in the trip Larry didn’t even own a tent, I’m not quite sure how he managed to sleep and stay dry. He used a tarp and a picnic table to create a kind of make-shift tent.
It’s a strange thing to be so cold and so wet in weather like this – and not have a real roof over your head. Not only for just a few hours, but for days. When the sun finally comes out and hits your skin – it’s an amazing feeling to be back on your bike.
This was taken around out 9th morning of our trip – we’re either on the far end of Washington or just getting into Idaho.
In the background you can half see a group of female bicyclists that we ran into several times up until Montana. They had a pretty inspiring mindset about traveling – and one of the women would later email me on the memories from her ride, saying:
“…It haunts me now like a dream that only exists in my head, separate from everything in my day to day ‘real’ life.”
I thought that was one of the most perfect and beautiful ways I’d ever heard a person describe the after effects of their trip.
This was one of the rare days that the wind was to Larry’s back – which also meant that I didn’t have to fight the wind when working the crane.
Most days it felt like trying to steady a massive sail with a camera on the end of it – but this day, the wind kept perfect pace with us, and I could move the camera almost anywhere without any real resistance.
This shot is a snippet from the middle of a longer 360˚ that follows Larry. But if I posted the whole rotation, it would be about 2 min… and that’s not much of a teaser.
This is almost a cut & paste right from the first 14 minutes of the feature film – I just decided to pull the music out because I’d like to keep that a secret… or something like that.
This is Larry watching the sunset on the Mississippi… he sat there and watched the sky for a long time on that bench. Tonight he sent me an email, and near the end of it, he reminded me of a few things from that night, he wrote:
“I remember watching that movie that was like Quiinosquatsi but callled something else [Baraka], in the van. And than I went and waded in the Mississippi and drank beers listening to Jeff Buckley and wishing he didn’t drown in that river.“
Zach B asked (in the comments of Teaser 008) for a clip that didn’t have a bicycle in it - he wanted something that was perhaps a macro, or had a silhouette in it… so I tried to include a bunch of those with this shot-pick.
This sunset and the blades of grass in the wind with the crickets reminds of ‘Days of Heaven’.
There’s something about this clip that is heavily nostalgic for me. I can remember so clearly nights from my past bicycle trips, laying in my sleeping bag on the grass… hearing the bugs… watching the sun sink behind the horizon as I tried to finish writing in my journal about that day when I’m watching this.
