The future has long been a very popular topic in cinema. A handful of videos posted here on streets.mn concern themselves with the future: Avidor, To New Horizons, The Automobile in the Year 2000, Bobbie Jones, Foreign Exchange Student in the Future, The Astounding World of the Future, and Magic Highway, USA.
The Future of Freeway Expansions is a short film I made way back in 2008 during the time of standard definition, miniDV tape, and the Great Recession. This is one of my first forays back into filmmaking since a couple of projects done on 16mm film and VHS tape during my college years.
Inspired by the many auto industry sponsored films of the 1950s that predict a utopian world filled with many fast cars and wide freeways, this short film takes a stab at predicting a future only a few years away from when it was made. Now that 2014 is here, I thought it would only be the right thing to do to share this film and open it up to the finger pointing and laughing that always ensues after the people of the future view these old films attempting to predict what their future time would be like. Most filmmakers choose to play it safe and use an ambiguous point in the future for their films or a time well beyond their anticipated life expectancy. Not me. I chose a point 5 whole years away.