Drive Train

There is an organization with a  website out there called the Prelinger Archives, and they have thousands of old films available for viewing and downloading.  Most of these films are of the type you would have seen in school growing up, such as "It's Tough to be a Teen", or "What's Going On Down There?"  Others are films created by corporations either to be viewed by their employees, or as advertisements between movies at the theater.  Most of them were made from the 1940's through early 1970's.  All of it is in the public domain, so you can download these films for free and do whatever you want to do with them.

In 2006, as I periodically do, I was browsing through some of these old films and I got to watching a lot of automobile advertisement clips produced by the major auto manufacturers.  Feeling creative, I decided to make a music video using clips from these car ads. 

I sat down with my guitar and wrote some music that was supposed to give the feel of a carefree ride in a vintage car.  Using an electric guitar, bass, synthesizer, and drum machine it took two or three nights to record the song.  I consider this song to be by one of my musical alter egos- Optic.  That is the band name I use for recordings in which I play all the instruments myself. 

Next, I downloaded a bunch of the old car ad films, which averaged about 5-7 minutes long each,  and set to work editing it all into a video.  To edit the video, which took several days of work, I went through all the car films and chopped them up and created a bunch of short clips.  On some of them I altered colors or did other editing tricks like speeding them up to enhance the presentation.

  This is my first attempt to post a video to this webpage.  The video looks ok, but the sound of the recording is a little distorted to me.  Nevertheless, I present to you "Drive Train"

Drive Train, by Optic. Written, recorded and produced by Darren Danger in 2006.

A Bullish Situation

This pic is from July, 2009, and it is of the daily cattle drive in Ft. Worth, Texas.  Each morning, in the old stockyards section of Ft. Worth, several attending cowboys drive about 12 or 15 longhorns a few blocks down the street to a corral, and in the afternoon they drive them back again.  Crowds of people gather along both sides of the street to watch.

 Ft. Worth was an important location in the days of the huge cattle drives of the Old West.  Thousands of cattle were driven into Ft. Worth along the Chisholm Trail.  The stockyards that held these cattle still stand, but most are now converted to shops.  The daily cattle drive for tourists is all just for show now.  It was pretty impressive standing just a few feet from those huge steers.  I can hardly imagine what it would have been like to stand there and watch hundreds go by.

Video Games- More Important than Ever

As a person who has spent about a billion hours playing videogames, I love this cartoon.