Thirteen seconds, one chair and one garage door are all this reel needs. It opens at dusk on a closed, dark blue-gray garage door with a single line of text across the screen: “My favorite show is about to start.” A man in a white cap, a teal T-shirt and black shorts walks up to a dark Adirondack chair that has been set in the middle of the concrete driveway, and he sits down with his back to the camera, facing the door.
The clip was posted by @mortysgarage with the caption “Not a bad view!” and the hashtags #fj60, #porsche, #landcruiser and #dreamgarage. Once he is seated, he raises one hand above his head toward the garage, lowers it to the armrest, and the door begins to move.
The door is the slow part, and that is the joke. It has a strip of small windows along the top that glow from the lights inside, and it takes roughly six of the reel’s thirteen seconds to travel all the way up. The man in the chair does not move the whole time. The camera sits directly behind him, so the viewer watches the same thing he does.
Tires show first under the rising edge, then bumpers, then the full picture. On the left is a cream Porsche 911 parked nose in, so what faces the driveway is its tail, with the red reflector band across the back and the Targa bar above it. On the right is a blue Toyota Land Cruiser parked the other way around, nose out, with TOYOTA spelled across the grille, a winch bumper up front and tall tires underneath. The garage is brightly lit with white walls, and a tool chest sits against the back wall between the two.
With the door all the way up, the reel cuts away from the driveway and gives each vehicle a portrait of its own. The first carries a title card reading “1983 Toyota Land Cruiser.” The blue wagon sits alone in a field of dry grass with its headlights on, under a sky streaked pink and orange. The second card reads “1985 Porsche 911.” The Targa is stopped on an empty two lane road with a double yellow line running past it, roof panel off, headlights on, and low sun catching its wheels. That is where the video ends.
Nothing in the clip explains how either one was found or how long he has owned them. The on-screen line, the two title cards and the caption are the only words attached to it, and the caption does the summing up in four of them: “Not a bad view!”
For anyone with a garage and something inside it worth looking at, the reel doubles as a simple recipe. The first ingredient is the parking. One car is nosed in and the other is backed in, so when the door rises the view is a tail next to a face instead of two matching bumpers. It makes the two vehicles read as two characters, and it costs nothing but a three point turn.
The second is the light. The reel is shot at dusk with the garage lights already on, which is why the windows in the door glow before anything is revealed and why the interior looks like a lit stage once the door clears. The same door opened at noon would show a dark box.
The third is restraint in how it is filmed. The camera is fixed in one spot, centered on the door, with the chair in the foreground to give the shot a subject. There is one sentence of text to set up the idea and one card per vehicle giving the year and model, which answers the first question any viewer would ask. Then it stops, at thirteen seconds.
The two closing portraits are worth copying on their own. Both were taken in open country at sunset, both have the headlights switched on, and both show the vehicle from a front three quarter angle with nothing else in the frame. The Land Cruiser is placed off the pavement in grass and the Porsche is placed on the road, so each one is pictured in the kind of place it was made for.
The pairing itself is the other half of the appeal. The #fj60 tag marks the Land Cruiser as the boxy four door wagon of the early 1980s, set up here with a winch and big tires, while the 911 is an open top sports car from two years later. They share a decade and a garage and very little else, and the man in the chair has arranged his evening so he can look at both.