Video: 30 Seconds in Prospect Park

August 18, 2016

How many ways do people love Prospect Park? This 30-second piece by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Marshall Curry shows quite a few. Curry, a Park Slope resident who comes to the Park to run, wander in the woods and cheer his kids at soccer games, was inspired to create this short video by the variety of passions and people he saw at the Park.

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Marshall gave us a few thoughts about his process and inspiration for the video:

“As a documentary filmmaker, I love to observe people, and one of the things I love about Prospect Park is how many different kinds of people there are, pursuing different passions. A friend of mine, Hilary McHone, used to shoot a one-second video with her phone every day and then knit them together into rapid-fire video journals of her life. It was amazing how evocative those super-short clips could be, how much story and mood could be packed into literally one second. One day I was at the Park, marveling at the diversity of people who were enjoying it in so many different ways – playing sports, wandering in the woods, having picnics with friends – and I thought the rapid-fire clips might be a neat way to try to capture what makes Prospect Park such a special place. So my co-worker, Daniel Koehler, and I scoured the web for clips that people had shot in the Park – not slick professional shots, but amateur (sometimes odd) genuine displays of passion – and edited together our 30 favorites.”

Marshall also loves the Park for his own purposes:

“One of the more unusual things that I have done at the Park is look at planets and the moon on a huge telescope with Brooklyn’s ‘Friendly Neighborhood Astronomer.’ I also love concerts in the summer, tossing baseballs and footballs with my kids. And the Park makes a big difference in the quality of life for my dog who might otherwise think that the world was made of concrete and asphalt.”