The Open Road: an early travelogue in colour
"In 1924 Claude Friese-Greene (cinematographer and son of moving-image pioneer William) embarked on an intrepid road trip from Land's End to John O'Groats. He recorded his journey on film, using an experimental colour process. Entitled The Open Road, this remarkable travelogue was conceived as a series of 26 short episodes, to be shown weekly at the cinema."
(Independent Cinema Office, UK)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
CityViewAR: remembering Christchurch before 4 September 2010
"CityViewAR is a mobile Augmented Reality application that allows people to see how the city was before the earthquakes and building demolitions. Using an Android mobile phone people can walk around the city and see life-sized virtual models of what the buildings looked like on site before they were demolished, and see pictures and written information. Hundreds of 3D models of key city buildings have been made available from architect Jason Mill of ZNO, while the Christchurch City Council and Historic Places Trust have provided photographs and building histories.
CityViewAR is based on the HIT Lab NZ Android AR platform which uses the GPS and compass sensors of mobile phones to enable virtual information to be overlaid on live video of the real world. Android AR makes it easy for Android developers to build their own outdoor AR applications. The software was previously used for showing individual buildings, but this is the first time that it has been used to show dozens of buildings at once, and the first time in world that mobile phone AR has been used for earthquake reconstruction."
(HIT Lab NZ, 2011)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Metro-land: romanticising the mundane
Metro-Land, the 1973 BBC documentary was Sir John Betjeman's "gift to romanticise the mundane: in this case a tube ride from Baker Street to Amersham, celebrating the north-west London suburbs created by the Metropolitan Railway between 1910 and 1933. ...
'Metro-Land' was the advertising slogan developed to entice workers from cramped homes in Central London out into the rural paradise of Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. It was invented in 1915 by the Metropolitan Railway's in-house copywriter James Garland, who according to legend was ill with influenza and sprang out of bed when he thought of the term. ...
It was, of course, largely a con. The creation of Metro-Land destroyed the very thing - open countryside - which was used to advertise it. The speculative homes thrown up around the new stations bore few resemblances to the Tudor cottages depicted in the advertising materials: most were dreary semis, constructed at great haste and sold for as little as £400 each. Modern first-time buyers can only dream: that is equivalent to just £20,000 in today's money."
(Telegraph Media Group Limited, 26 Sep 2006)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Turner Prize 2012 winner: Elizabeth Price
"Elizabeth Price describes her films as moving 'from something that looks like a PowerPoint lecture, to something that looks like an infomercial to something that feels like a cinematic melodrama'. For the Turner Prize exhibition, Price is presenting her video installation THE WOOLWORTHS CHOIR OF 1979 2012. Comprising three parts, the video brings together distinct bodies of material into a dissonant assembly; photographs of church architecture, internet clips of pop performances and news footage of a notorious fire in a Woolworths furniture department in 1979. The film weaves together existing archives of text, image and sound to create video installations that drift between social history and fantasy."
(Tate, UK)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Archives New Zealand, Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga
"Archives New Zealand, Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga is the official guardian of New Zealand’s public archives. We gather, store and protect an extremely wide range of material. Our holdings include the originals of the Treaty of Waitangi, government documents, maps, paintings, photographs and film."
(The Aotearoa New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs Te Tari Taiwhenua)
Fig.1 "Toehold on a Harbour (1966)", Colour, 10 minutes, 35mm, 972 ft., DV file of Beta SP of telecini of 35mm film. W3606/c/25.
Fig.2 "Introducing New Zealand (1955)", W3471/kk/619 DV file of Beta SP telecini of 35mm film.
Fig.3 "Four Cities (1951) (AAPG W3471/3398)", Silent colour travelogue film around the major cities of New Zealand, Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. The major sites and scenes of the cities are shown. 2K scan of 16mm reversal print.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
