The trees here were huge, forty feet and higher. Or maybe they’d been planted before that variety was developed. I think I tried to reason it as maybe these were the first experimental orchards that hazelnut farmers had started planting many decades ago. I guess at the time I was thinking about how easy it would be to get cut off by high water. I was worried if there was anything really good to film it’d be too dark, but more I had this uncomfortable indistinct sense of dread, and I didn’t know why. It was almost completely dark when I finally crossed under the freeway and over the bridge into that lost land. Just beyond that was a small bridge over a small creek, no doubt the source of seasonal flooding. It meant that when this flooded, the entire section of land would be inaccessible. I could see it rising up the pillars that held up the freeway. It would have been mud when the road flooded after heavy rains. Underneath the freeway, where the road dipped down, there was a thin layer of dust. There were also plenty of high wateflood signs, though they weren’t relevant that night. It was battered and dented, clearly, it had been struck many times by trucks that hadn’t been heading the warnings. It was a low clearance, and there was a large brightly colored sign on the roadway. I can remember rounding a forested hill and then almost coming to a complete stop when I came to the point where the road dipped below the freeway. Maybe I should have taken that as a hint. I got turned around a bit even trying to find the access road. I started feeling creeped out even before I reached that place. Just like I’d done plenty of times before. It piqued my curiosity.Īt any rate, I got in my car, headed out just before sunset, and started recording. It was sort of like a little lost piece of land, in the middle of a well-populated larger valley. The freeway was built back in the sixties, and I’d guess if anybody ever had an interest in developing that weird peninsula of land, that interest would have disappeared when the freeway went up. That dark green of hazelnut orchards, and a few scattered houses. I could tell from Google Earth that there were still people who went there. The only way to access it was through this long winding road that passed underneath the freeway, and that road itself was hard to access. The other side was cut off by the freeway. The section of land was cut off on three sides by a great big curving meander of the river, with no bridges. I’d collected more B-roll than I needed, but I was also still having fun, so I thought one more trip wouldn’t hurt. I found a place I hadn’t explored yet, a pretty big place I didn’t even really know existed. If you want to read the backstory, if you want to understand what had made me so excited that I almost lost everything, if you’d like to know what could have possessed me to explore where I wasn’t supposed to go, that’s all over on my subreddit I thought that could have been cinematographic gold. That meant anything could have been there. “Off the beaten path” was putting it mildly. It was a section of land not far away, but surprisingly difficult to access. I was almost done with the B-roll when I found something on the map that I hadn’t noticed before. I hadn’t any idea I could have been putting myself in danger. I’d been doing it for a few weeks and getting some great shots. That meant installing a dashcam in my car, and driving around my local area, late in the evening or in the dark of night. You start to fail to notice things, you make decisions that maybe you shouldn’t have.įor my part, I was so excited that I wanted to start filming some B-roll. It was the sort of project you can get so excited about that it’s easy to get tunnel vision. And even if it didn’t smash the box office, it was destined to be at least a cult hit. “The Road Trip Project” was a placeholder name for a found footage horror film my friends and I wanted to produce.
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