Cy Kuckenbaker

Kuckenbaker is from Alaska and briefly attended college in South Dakota.^[1] He moved to Hillcrest in 1993,^[2] and graduated from San Diego State University in 1998.^[3] Kuckenbaker made the film Tiger Oak + Echo^[4] after serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kupiškis, Lithuania from 2000-2002.^[2] He was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in 2004 and received a Master of Fine Arts at California Institute of the Arts in 2006.^[5] Kuckenbaker has been a professor at San Diego City College since 2010.^[3][4]

In 2013, Kuckenbaker partnered with the Museum of Photographic Arts through the Creative Catalyst Grant from the San Diego Foundation to produce a series of videos^[6] stemming off his viral content and creative edits of traffic, planes and everyday life in San Diego.^[7] After relocating near San Diego International Airport,^[8] he said the planes were recorded on Black Friday, November 23, 2012, between 10:30am and 3pm, following inspiration from a composite photo at Hannover Airport by Ho-Yeol Ryu.^[9][10] Kuckenbaker said it took approximately 2 hours of editing for every 1 second of finished video rendering^[11] and that he had to composite additional time lapse footage over the render to give the illusion that time was passing.^[12] He recorded 462 cars over 4 minutes from the Washington Street bridge overlooking SR-163 on October 1, 2013.^[13]