In February 2011, we found ourselves charging back and forth across Bolivia.  We rushed from the Lake Titicaca region, all the way down to Uyuni, so that we could meet some friends for a tour of the salt flats.  If you saw that video, you’ll know we bailed out on them after we picked up a nasty intestinal parasite.  We eventually returned to Uyuni to do the tour again, but not before going all the way back to La Paz for a week or so.

We self medicated there and, once we were feeling up to it, decided to mountain bike down the World’s Most Dangerous Road – its real name, the North Yungas Road – which connects La Paz, high in the Andes, to the Amazon Basin, thousands of meters below.

We recorded our voice-overs a day or two after the ride, while the memories were fresh.  That painted background was actually the wall of our hotel room in La Paz.  Both Oksana and I had a lot to say; each of us spoke into the camera for more than 20 minutes.  (We really need to be more concise.)  This project was a nightmare to edit down.

The final video runs almost 12 minutes and has a lot of information about the road and why it’s considered the most dangerous in the world.  If you’re interested, here are a few more tidbits that were left on the cutting room floor: (more…)

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Here’s a little video about my time spent in Baños, Ecuador (and no, before you ask, “Baños” does not refer to a “bathroom,” but rather the thermal baths the area is known for!)

A little bit of background info:

We don’t particularly like the song I edited this video to, mostly because it is way overplayed down here. Seemed appropriate, however, since we heard it approximately 342,000 times while we were in Baños.

Not everything you see in the video happened on this trip. I have a lot of footage from last year when I brought a few UAS students down to Ecuador. I decided to incorporate some of those clips because, well, we didn’t get to do all those things on this trip (mostly because Oksana was busy taking 4 hours of Spanish lessons every day!)

Our last two nights were spent at Luna Runtun, a resort and spa perched on a cliff, directly above Baños.  The first night, I decided to experiment with my DSLR and took one photo of Baños every minute over the course of two hours (it was pretty easy, I was sitting in a volcanic hot tub at the time.)  My hope was that I would be able to use the frames to create a tiny video clip of Baños at sunset.  So that I could pan across the image during the short video, I made sure to move the camera a little bit every fifteen minutes.  By cropping the video, I thought I’d be able to center and move the video frame cleverly enough to hide those camera movements.  Well, because of the minor — but noticeable — shift in perspective with each camera move, that didn’t work out so great.  I tried to finesse it a bit in post, but then realized I was spending way too much time on a video that was supposed to be a quick edit, anyway.  So… I just kind of dropped the clip in, anyway.  I think it still looks kind of cool, even if it is jerky at times.