Status – Wallace Darwin

I am now on YouTube

I have been making some good friends at my new job, and I have been telling this guy Marc Gould about some of the videos I made over a year ago. Turns out Marc is really into social media because he has this radio-controlled car club that’s big on Twitter, and YouTube, and Instagram.

So Marc’s been telling me that nobody is going to watch my videos if I just have them on Vimeo and on my website, which seems to be true so far. He says that I need to get on social media and to promote what I am doing, and that if I put my videos on YouTube then more people will watch them. So I am giving that a try.

Marc showed me how to set up my YouTube channel here. On YouTube you can see my Episode #00001 here, Episode #00002 here, and Episode #00003 here.

Getting back on my feet…

Wow, I really abandoned this project, didn’t I?

I can’t believe that a year has gone by and I haven’t done anything. Well, I have done a lot… or I had to do a lot… but not here on my site, or on my videos.

I don’t know where to even start with what’s been going on. It’s been heavy, life changing really. Major loss in my life, and that kind of kicked me out of everything that was my routine.

And then eventually I moved. It was totally weird for me to move out of my neighborhood, I thought I was going to be Mapleton for life you know. But I lost my connection to the place, and then I had this chance to switch jobs and that sort of pushed me over the edge. I finally have myself set up in this little apartment in Astoria, Queens, right near where I work.

I am feeling a bit more settled, and I haven’t stopped thinking about living things and where they come from, so I am hoping to get going on my videos again soon.

Still thinking about my questions

The few of you who actually check this site will notice that it has been a whole lot of nothing lately.

That’s not because I am doing nothing, but there’s been nothing to show for awhile. Work is still taking up most of my time, especially with pickets and other union events to go to while we don’t have a new contract.

While I can’t shoot if I don’t have time, I can still think. There’s plenty of time to think while I am driving from job to job. So I have begun to come up with some ideas for future episodes:

I have been noticing that there are a lot more plants than animals and I want to do an episode about that.
As I ride the bus to work every day I have become more and more aware of how different places are home to different kinds of people. I am wondering if something similar is going on with living things besides humans.
I have been thinking about good and evil and I am wondering if they exist in nature. I know that other animals (and definitely plants) don’t live by the same moral laws that we do, but a lot of what goes on in nature is what we would call “evil”. And then there’s the occasional “good”. I am curious about why good and evil appear to exist in nature as well with us humans.
At work our job is basically to make connections happen, so I am always thinking about networks. This got me thinking about connections in nature. If nature is like a big machine, I guess I am curious about what circuits make nature work.

Still plenty of work to be done to turn these ideas into the next episodes, but I am working on that.

A few of my friends who have checked out my videos have complained to me a bit, basically asking when I am going to stop asking and start answering. I see what they are saying… eventually I do want to get to answering my questions. But for now I feel like I need to get all my questions out on the table before I start to answer them, so that’s what I plan to do.

Progress on Episode #00003

My third episode is going to be all about the various forms that living things take, why they take different forms, and how we put those different forms into groups.

I have been getting a out a bit more in my neighborhood and where I work to shoot for this episode. This past weekend I went back to Calvert Vaux to talk about plants, and took to the boardwalk on Coney Island to record a bit about animals. For the past episodes I have been pretty much avoiding places where there are a lot of people, but I am realizing that a lot of what I want to figure out can be understood by looking at the way that we people live. So I am shooting a bit more in crowds, which is interesting.

Finally getting a chance to look at some of my footage tonight. Sample images from a few of my most recent shoots are posted below…

Trip to the New York Aquarium

After getting out the second episode I am starting to get the hang of this video-making thing. I am also starting to get a lot of ideas about future episodes… they are almost lining themselves up like boxcars on a freight train in my head.

I don’t get out to the zoos and the aquarium as much as I used to these days, but I was working in the Coney Island area on an early shift today, so at the end of my shift I decided to get into the aquarium for an hour. I took a lot of really great B-roll at the aquarium and on the beach at Coney Island. Some sample stills are in the gallery below…

The aquarium is just about living things that call the ocean home, and mostly about animals and not plants. They don’t even have half of their displays up because most of the place was destroyed during Hurricane Sandy, but you can still see that the creatures that live in and around the ocean come in so many different varieties it makes your head spin. I think that the next episode will have something to do with how different living things come in such different forms.

Getting close to a second episode

This week I managed to finishing shooting for my second episode, which is about death and survival.

Our contract at work is expiring, actually tonight at midnight, so I have been spending a lot of time with the union on that problem, but somehow I managed to get all my footage together. I guess if we go on strike I will have more time on my hands for these videos, huh?

I have been mostly shooting in my neighborhood, but I also got out to Calvert Vaux before work to shoot one bit.

I have some time off this weekend, so I should be able to edit something for next week.

Images from the latest shoots below…

Slow train to a second episode

Things have been crazy at work, so right now my videos are arriving slower than the G train.

After working a whole bunch of overtime, which basically leaves me with no daylight to shoot and no energy even if there is still a bit of light, I am finally getting some work in on the second episode.

Today we had a big thunderstorm, so I got some amazing shots of Washington Cemetery until it looked like my camera was about to get water-logged.

Some more shots below…

2015-07-15d