Our Milwaukee Video Street Tour - Oklahoma Ave. West
2,465
Published 2019-04-15
Here is a link to the playlist of all the videos in this series:
• Our Milwaukee
Music:
"Tranquility"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
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What These Are
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In this series of videos, I do some street driving tours of many major arteries on Milwaukee's historic South Side. Milwaukee is my old hometown, and in many ways you never really leave. The memories remain strong, and I am especially tied to the locales - the streets and neighborhoods, the architecture and buildings, the parks, churches and highways. These videos are for me and everyone who wants to revisit those old haunts.
The area roughly encompasses from Greenfield on the north end, KK/1st/Packard on the east side, Howard/College on the south side, and 43rd st on the west side. This was approximately my old stomping grounds, the area of most of my frequent travels as a youth growing up in Milwaukee in the 70s and 80s. I had seen some other street tour videos on YouTube and thought it might be of interest to others who remember these old hometown areas to be able to visit them again.
How These Were Filmed
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I had done some drive-arounds in the past (and even posted a few to YouTube) with home video camcorders, but this time around I had a 4k camera and a more specific goal: to record longer, continuous sections of streets and most importantly, to record them moving much slower. I found that my previous attempts, which admittedly were just for my own archives and not meant to be seen, driving at 25 or 30mph or more resulted in a lot of blurry footage. 25mph doesn't seem very fast, but on camera it all whooshes by. I wanted to be able to better focus on specific landmarks, buildings and homes. In these videos, the goal was to move at under 20mph when possible, 10-15mph preferably. Many of these were shot at 10-15mph, but on some busier streets like 27th, which also has more large buildings/businesses than houses, I had to drive more like 20-30mph.
Filming Method
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I tried as best I could to film these as smoothly as possible (and remove redundant things like long waits at lights and camera bumps and such) but this was done in live traffic and Wisconsin roads are, well, you know how they are. :) These were basically filmed with the camera on top of a tripod sticking out the top of my sunroof, in a effort to get the clearest possible image and avoid shooting through the windshield. It also had the benefit of being a higher vantage point. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my auto focus set right, so it will sometimes blur slightly, but then it refocuses right away and comes back.
Video Editing
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Edited and outputted fully at 4k resolution, filmed at 30fps. Many cross streets are noted with an overlay, and other landmarks have animated text moving through the image to highlight them.
All Comments (4)
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14:49 When I was I kid, I loved going to this library. Coolest architecture, so much so that even as a kid, I could appreciate it. Beautiful drive down Oklahoma. Thanks so much for posting!
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Thank you so much for these videos, especially this one. I grew up in Milwaukee and lived there for the first 33 years of my life (Cudahy, Oak Creek, Eastside, St. Francis) and all of my family still lives there. I've been very homesick and seeing this really brought some comfort, although also a bit of sadness and longing for days and people that are gone now. <3
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Unfortunately the old ways are being lost and the safe, leisurely life style Oklahoma Ave once provided is at risk of being no more! In an ironic twist of fate, Milwaukee's attempt's at Gentrifying the near Southside, with the walkers point neighborhood being the main focal point of revitalization and rehabilitation. When the work started and the ppl had to unfortunately start moving, they went south towards Oklahoma Ave and the cime has skyrocketed, especially at night!
