The Electric Radiance of Los Angeles.

August 5, 2011 4:42 AM

LA Light is a hauntingly beautiful multiple angle time lapse short of LA by night. Shot over six months by Colin Rich, whose high altitude Pacific Star balloon imagery has featured previously on the blue.
posted by Ahab (15 comments total)

I started You Are Listening to Los Angeles to play alongside this, before I knew the video itself had sound, and it just all synched up so nicely. YMMV.
posted by knile at 4:56 AM on August 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

Amazing.
posted by a non e mouse at 5:19 AM on August 5, 2011

That was stunning.
posted by vbfg at 5:38 AM on August 5, 2011

I thought that song was Coldplay until just now. Now I feel less guilty for loving it.
posted by empath at 5:47 AM on August 5, 2011

Nice little film. For my money the best film about LA is James Benning's trilogy, especially the final film, Los. The film is made up of 35 static locked off shots, each running for 2 1/2 minutes and it's just amazing (even if that doesn't sound like). AFAIK he only shows them from film prints so you have to find a film festival or gallery to catch them.
posted by ciderwoman at 5:59 AM on August 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

Beautiful. Makes me want to watch Collateral again +_+
posted by baejoseph at 6:01 AM on August 5, 2011

You know, I don't comment much, but that's really a lovely confection there. Thanks.
posted by BlackPebble at 6:19 AM on August 5, 2011

Hee... When that song opened up, I thought it was going to be a lilting acoustic version of this (à la Eric C's acou-version of "Layla"). So I muted the sound and kicked this up while the images played. Made it less "hauntingly beautiful", fer shure, but if anything increased the images' messaging greatly.
posted by Mike D at 7:07 AM on August 5, 2011

It's pretty. But... my first thought, aside from that, was "how incredibly wasteful".

We need to turn the lights off. We don't need them. Not to the extent we currently use them, anyway. There are stars ABOVE the sidewalks in LA too. You just can't see them any more.
posted by caution live frogs at 7:08 AM on August 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

That's absolutely stunning. Makes me remember all over again what's magical about my birthplace.
posted by blucevalo at 7:11 AM on August 5, 2011

I've flown in and out of Los Angeles regularly for the last five years, and one of the things I always look forward to coming back in is seeing the field of lights unfold below me for an hour before landing at LAX. (Now, how I feel about all this sprawl is different, but in a purely aesthetic sense it's breathtaking!)
posted by andrewesque at 7:19 AM on August 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

My reaction was similar to caution live frogs; beautiful imagery, but vague horror at all of the sprawl and light pollution. And it wouldn't be a film featuring Los Angeles without all of the shots of traffic, but it brought back unpleasant memories of the hundreds of hours I spent sitting in it.

I really liked that tracking shot of the Library Tower towards the beginning, though. I'm not sure I've ever seen a time-lapse tracking shot before.
posted by usonian at 7:28 AM on August 5, 2011

Beautiful. Makes me want to watch Collateral again +_+

Agreed. Michael Mann absolutely loves nighttime LA sprawl. Heat has at least two scenes that seem primarily intended to showcase it.
posted by googly at 7:48 AM on August 5, 2011

Amazing, I've always felt that the electric hum of LA light was something special, and this proves it. I watched with the sound off as, I thought that the images would be powerful enough. I was right.
posted by ob at 8:15 AM on August 5, 2011

I like the images but not the editing. The jump cuts interrupt the flow.
posted by Jode at 1:32 PM on August 5, 2011