When By The Pool Is Not By The Pool

I’ve lived in houses with pools on occasion in my life, and unlike a house that is near the beach, lake or ocean, we don’t say the house is by a pool. Why is that?

And stranger, why do we sometimes just forget that we have a pool or even look at it every single day? It certainly costs enough in upkeep to warrant a dip or our attention or some daily small acknowledgment of its beauty and majesty — Come on, it’s a tiny pond made by hand in the middle of nowhere just to be a hundred feet from your bedroom. You used to have to build an entire house in just the right spot for that!

Somedays you forget it’s there. And it patiently waits. Like pets when you leave the house.

So here in it’s honor, is “Day By The Pool” and art project timelapse https://youtu.be/-SKriJQRxjY

The music is an instrumental demo of “Searchlight”, music I wrote for a friend’s lyric back in the 80s, recorded onto a cassette four-track. It’s played on a CasioTone MT-41 which I still own. Retro and analog cred, perfectly suitable for an artsy soundtrack to an ironically artsy timelapse off a security camera where no one uses the pool. Marvel as it gets bleached white by the midday Phoenix sun before a towering pine tree’s shadow creeps up on it to rescue the colors just before everything turns gray with the night. And we see the family by the pool, but not. *

— David

* That’s what I noticed, anyway. Wyze camera, edited in Adobe Premiere.

P.S. This was pulled off the cam as tiny clips of an entire day, starting in the dark. I sorted them in Premiere by folder and then name so they didn’t have to manually ordered (sorting by timestamp didn’t work because the filenames repeat inside sub hour folders…. annoying until you figure out the sort!

Then because it was in real time I created a sequence and time-ramped it as high as I could go, then copied that subsequence to a new timeline to ramp it more, and so on to the final edit sequence with the titles and color grade. I ultimately trimmed the song because the motion and texture changes are more compelling and interesting at three minutes instead of four — I know maybe even more so at 30 seconds, but some things need patience. I don’t have any myself but my mother used to say it was “iimportant” so sometimes I practice. This would be “neat” shorter but the mood would evaporate.