Your Bernalwood neighbor, Stephan Alm, shared this supremely excellent time-lapse video with us:
I just completed a short time-lapse video showing a day in Bernal Heights. I shot the footage in February and just got around to chopping it up.
Bravo! Very luscious. I enjoyed this so much, I watched it seven times… which means I basically saw a week in Bernal Heights in less than 10 minutes. And I loved every second of it.
OMG, did you see the thing in Rolling Stone about the fabulous new video from My Morning Jacket??
My Morning Jacket have unveiled a stimulating new video for the druggy ode “Outta My System,” featuring Zach Galifianakis as a powerful wizard in a cartoon world. “Told me not to smoke drugs, but I wouldn’t listen,” sings frontman Jim James, before he and the band enter an animated landscape worthy of a peyote trip. After landing in the psychedelic alternate reality, the musicians become cyclopses, traversing the trippy universe in a hotwired cosmic car.
Check it out:
As we all know, a freaky video “worthy of a peyote trip” can only have come from one place: The Dominion of Bernalwood. And where in Bernal Heights?
Bernal celebrity Michael Gilette writes:
Here’s something made in Bernalwood. I made all the artwork and directed the animated portion of this My Morning Jacket Video on Lundy’s Lane.
Wow! Hotness!!! Oh, and here’s the proof: Neighbor Michael gets a big honkin’ production credit at the end of the vid:
Lots more eye-popping images from the video right here.
Congratulations, Michael, and thanks for making us all slightly more glamorous.
Last week saw the launch of HYPNO SF, a thing whose Twitter bio says it’s “visually exploring + animating San Francisco” with crazy/amazing yo-yo videos of the Golden Gate Bridge, Market Street from the Ferry Building to the Castro, and more. These shots can be seen in the video for a song called Water Falls by Kalle Mattson, and and in animated GIF form. The gorgeous spinning shot of Sutro Tower at the end of the video really got my attention.
Why not try something similar for Bernal’s own Sutrito Tower, I thought. So, with my iPhone and bicycle, I set off to get some pictures.
Map image I had on my iPhone as a guide for taking pictures approximately the same distance from Sutrito Tower.
I figured that the hard part would be aligning and scaling the pictures, so I wanted to take them from close to the same distance from the tower. I had the map above open in Safari, and switched back and forth between that, Maps, and the Camera app. I ended up deviating from a circular path quite a bit, in order to get usable pictures:
Actual track taken. More or less. Reconstructed from embedded lat/longs in the pictures.
I got back and started aligning and stacking images. File, Save As, GIF, click the “animated GIF” (not “flatten”) radio button, and I soon had a 16 megabyte animated GIF. And it basically worked!
So that was a nice way to spend a Saturday.
Hey bro, SFist tips us to this lolz video:
PBR, Dolores Park, Madrone, salted-caramel, guys who wear those brightly colored sunglasses, Bi-Rite Creamery, start-ups, average-size penises — Chris Avery’s parody rap video ‘SF Playa’ pokes fun at San Francisco’s current state of insufferable smugness.
(PRO TIP: For maximum dramatic effect, play this link through your headphones while watching the videos in this post.)
The clouds were dramatic Sunday afternoon, so I went looking for a slightly different angle to capture Bernal Hill, Sutrito Tower, and Mighty Sutro with time-lapse clouds as background. This view features a blue tarp, for extra enjoyment.
In the afternoon sun, though, the view to the east from the hill was even more dramatic. There’s some circulation apparent here, with the foreground clouds moving north and the background clouds moving south.
Above is a Sutrito sunset from the weekend before last, St. Patrick’s Day, I think.
Monday night (March 26), I tried to get the Moon/Venus/Jupiter trifecta, but never caught a glimpse of Jupiter through the clouds:
Malki Means King recorded much of his new rap video atop Bernal Hill, and no wonder: He was looking for a location that embodies the grandeur of the Almighty:
Malki Means King raps about letting go and giving your faith to a higher power in this video. In order to achieve your goals and overcome any obstacle, I believe a faith in a higher power is needed. Nobody can do it by themselves, Let go and let God!
While we’re on the subject of the area around Folsom and Precita streets, I am reminded of a fascinating video that was forwarded to me recently by Bernalwood contributor David Gallagher.
As some of you may recall, Bernal was a hotbed of of leftist radicalism during the 1970s, and for a time the home at 288 Precita was used as a safehouse by the Symbianese Liberation Army, at the time of the Patty Hearst kidnapping.
Moreover, the sequence of events that lead to Patty Hearst’s rescue began here, in 1975, when FBI agents raided the house on Precita and arrested some of the SLA leadership.
David calls our attention to this video, which was taken from “The Ordeal of Patty Hearst,” a made-for-TV movie from 1979. Most interesting of all, however, is the fact the the movie was filmed on location, here in Bernal Heights, in the very homes and businesses where the events unfolded. Talk about verisimilitude…
So it’s a twofer: A video history lesson about the capture of the SLA leadership in Bernal Heights, and a window on what the neighborhood looked like in the late 1970s. Bonus: My house used to be… turquoise?!
Here’s the video:
PHOTO: Top, 288 Precita Ave. in 2010, by Telstar Logistics
When you awoke this morning, did you think to yourself, “What I’d really like to see right now is an extended remix of Jhameel’s song “Bernal Heights” augmented with videogame footage of a laser-equipped spaceship navigating through a field of digital asteroids?”
Well, lucky you! And in a totally weird way, the mix kind of works. But maybe that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Bucky Knaebel shared something very cool with Bernalwood:
I finally got my last short film online. I filmed it at 4 Star Video, and it won the Audience Award at the Bernal Heights Outdoor Cinema last season.
And no wonder… it’s mighty charming. And smart. And funny. And sweet. Thanks and congratulations, Bucky!
Remember that house at 315 Precita? The one on Precita Park we talked about a few weeks back?
According to the realtor, our new neighbor is named Jeremy, and from the look of things, he had a swinging little housewarming recently. Smoooooove moooooves.
Welcome to Bernalwood, Neighbor Jeremy!
I love this:
Bernal Dreams – Short Film directed by Tomas Wischerath, creator of of Left Lane Productions. Starring Rosenburg Jose Diaz. All stunts were performed live on Bernal Hill, in San Francisco, California.
This video is like a freebase hit of pure Bernal Heights. It happened last Friday, and Gareth Spor so captured it.
So, did you happen to catch the lunar eclipse that took place at around 6 am last Saturday, December 10? It was a total lunar eclipse, which means that the moon seemed to disappear for a few moments as it passed through the Earth’s shadow.
Neighbor Joe Thomas woke up early to capture the cosmic event from his apartment in Bernal Heights (so you didn’t have to). He then compressed the results into the fabulous time-lapse video you see above.
It’s like, totality, dude.
UPDATE: La Lengua rebel leader Burrito Justice also arose early to watch the eclipse, and he took some great photos from atop our Bernal Hill homeland. Sutro Tower and a disappearing moon… together at last!
Bernalwood 
