Thundering Herd

This is the odd perspective you get from my Silver Lake backyard when you jam an old low-res camera into the eye-piece of a 20X spotting scope (at right), duct tape them both together and point the contraption down at Sunset Boulevard and capture at a frame a second the river of humanity that surges through this spot just past the beginning of the seventh mile of the LA Marathon. First it starts as a trickle with the elite runners, then the street soon floods curb-to-curb before eventually easing back down to those diehard participants slowly bringing up the rear.

All in, it’s about two hours condensed down to about eight and a half minutes that to me gives off something of a vintage vibe, as if this was footage shot with a rudimentary camera in the 1920s and colorized.

UPDATE (3.19): For a less strange look, here’s some real-time video of the thundering herd as it passed me at the curb. After setting up the scopecam Susan and I walked the half-block to Sunset to support and cheer on my neighbor Dean who was running in the LA Marathon in support of and to raise awareness for the Wounded Warrior Project. When we got there, we found another neighbor, Ralph, who’d brought out his drum (as well as an excellent St. Patty’s Day-green dye job to his  goatee), so Susan went back and got my drum and together the two of us banged on them (with another neighbor occasionally accompanying on cowbell) as a parade of  thousands of marathoners entered the race’s seventh mile in Silver Lake.