The Lost Trip
The four rules of sequels.
In the summer of 2021, Daniel Sloan and I drove a lap around the state of Oregon, where we filmed M3baru, a 12-minute video about his M3-swapped, all-wheel drive BMW E46 wagon. At the time, it was the most complex thing I had filmed and edited, and it became my most successful video ever.
So what does anyone do after achieving some amount of success in film?
A sequel, of course.
The first rule of sequels: strike while the iron’s hot.
Just seven months after the release of the video, we had plans for a follow-up, and an occasion as well: Daniel planned to drive the M3baru to Texas, and he needed me to help him drive it back to Portland.
The second rule of sequels: you must go bigger.
We plotted a gorgeous route through the scenic American southwest, eastern California, Nevada, and Oregon. The plan was to retrace some of the steps we had done on a previous winter trip in his M3 convertible.
We’d spend two days in Big Bend National Park on our way out of Texas, and then go through Death Valley, Alabama Hills, California’s route 395, and Lake Tahoe. Near the end, we would revisit Alvord Desert in Oregon, which had provided such a dramatic setting for the first video the previous summer. It was sort of a ‘greatest hits’ of our favorite photo locations from some of our past drives.
The third rule of sequels: retreading old ground doesn’t always work.
I realized during the trip that this creative endeavor, if you can call it that, was doomed.
The first M3baru video worked because it had a story. In it, Daniel recounts the saga of the history with the car. Daniel had already had a lifetime of ups and downs with the car in a year-and-a-half of ownership. I was there for a good chunk of that. There was something to say, with a beginning, middle, and end. The short summary:
Daniel bought a project car with
lots ofissues, then did many additional modifications to shape it into his dream fast/offroad/roadtrip wagon.
We attempted to drive the car around Oregon in winter, but experienced catastrophic engine failure on the second day of our trip, leaving us stranded seven hours away from Portland.
The engine was rebuilt in the spring, and the car was rally-ready by summer. Getting it back on the road was a milestone. The M3baru summer trip (and accompanying video) was a celebration of that milestone.
M3baru 2 was shaping up to be a half-baked car review (maybe?) of a still-unfinished car, shot in pretty landscapes. Or maybe it was a travelogue. Or maybe it would cover what had been changed on the car since the previous summer. There wasn’t much substance, and there was even less of a plan. I hoped it would just come together. It never did.
On the last day of the drive, we broke a part of the exhaust outside of Bend, OR (jump to the end to see how), and the writing was already on the wall. It was not meant to be.
Sequel… rule four? Editing Hell
I got home, looked at the footage, and then moved it to a hard drive with the other footage that was either finished or I had to plans to revisit.
A lot of the footage ended up being… I won’t say unusable, but I didn’t love it. I was trying a new camera, and I had shot a lot of stuff relying on the cameras electronic stabilization. It looked good in the camera display, but looked pretty bad on a computer display. Lesson learned.
Some footage was used in a video called 9 Things I Do Every Time I Shoot Cars, which I had written at the beginning of the trip and we planned ahead to get footage for it. (This video itself could be considered a sequel to Everything I Don’t Do When I Shoot Cars).
So I associate this trip with lots of unused footage, but I forget that I also shot over 700 photos. I posted a handful to Instagram at the time, but a lot of these had nowhere to go, so I didn’t edit them or gave them much time.
So I’m sharing the highlights here.
I hate writing a first-we-did-this, then-we-went-here type rundown of a road trip almost as much as you hate reading it, but that’s what the rest of this post is going to be.
Big Bend National Park / Marfa (Texas)
Daniel hadn’t been to Big Bend, and I had only been one time. There’s plenty of hiking, miles of off-road trails, and we lucked out with some great sunsets and sunrises despite mostly cloudy and frigid January weather.
Death Valley National Park (California)
We didn’t stop much between Texas and Death Valley, and once in Death Valley, I think I was already anticipating the next stop more.
The weird thing about retreading your steps is that living in the past makes it impossible to enjoy the moment. You’re too busy thinking about what happened before, or what you know is coming up next.
Alabama Hills (California)
This was the most anticipated stop on the drive for me. We went here in 2016, and I still think it’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. The snow-covered mountains rising from high desert is incredible. It is definitely worth getting up to see the sunrise. (We came back here with the Rivian R1T and I made a video that I did finish)
Highway 395 / Lake Tahoe (California)
Highway 395 runs north to south through the east edge of California, separated from the rest of CA by the Sierras. It is mostly isolated and relatively unpopulated, and takes you to Lake Tahoe, and it’s very pretty the whole way.
In a sad, on-the-nose metaphor, we spent a lot of time actually trying to recreate a photo we had taken in 2016, to no avail. The sun was too high in the sky, the light was different, and there were shrubs in the way.
Alvord Desert (Oregon)
This surreal desert expanse was a highlight of the previous trip, and it was sort of on the way, so we made plans to revisit. I think we got some good stuff here, and it’s so incredible to just keep shooting until there is no light left in the sky. I will always jump at the chance to shoot in an environment like this, but actually I don’t think I’ve ever been to another place like this.
Central Oregon
In Oregon we started hitting snow, and then we hit ice (see video to see how the exhaust became broken).
