* FIRST 3D BUILDING VIEW ON GOOGLE EARTH

RESEARCH: Keith Loutit

"Sydney photographer and filmmaker Keith Loutit attracted an internet and media sensation, following the release of his 'Bathtub' series of short films, that transformed both iconic and familiar Sydney scenes into miniature wonderlands. Known as the pioneer of the tilt-shift / time-lapse technique, Loutit was the first to recognize how time and focus combine to support the powerful illusion of miniaturization in film. In his scaled down and sped up realities, real world subjects become their miniature counterparts. Boats bob like toys in a bathtub, cars race like slot-cars, and crowds march as toy armies. Loutit's aim is create a sense of wonder in our surroundings by "challenging people's perceptions of scale, and helping the viewer to distance themselves from places they know well".

Small World's Project

Small Worlds is Loutit's most ambitious project to date, documenting the world's great cities, landscapes and monuments of the ancient world in miniature. In a time of population explosion, impacts to our environment, and concern over limited resources our world feels smaller than ever. But through Loutit's lens the world seems simple and uncomplicated, the differences between people are reduced, and obstacles seem easily overcome. By presenting a view of the world from 'the outside in' Loutit aims to tell an inspirational story of mankind working together as one. We will see cities being built, the world's great events, and daily life all in Loutit's trademark style of miniaturization."
http://keithloutit.com/
his tilt-shift / time-lapse technique is a very nice looking video! you can see his videos on his website

http://keithloutit.com/

Monster Trucks - Tour of Destruction

Monster Trucks - Tour of Destruction: "Monster Trucks - Tour of Destruction"

by Keith Loutit

RESEARCH: Olivo Barbieri’s model world.

An aqueduct on the periphery of Rome
The Queen Mary, Long Beach, California
New York-New York Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas

It’s often hard to convince people that Olivo Barbieri’s aerial photographs are real. They look uncannily like hyperdetailed models, absent the imperfections of reality. Streets are strangely clean, trees look plastic, and odd distortions of scale create the opposite effect of what we expect from aerial photography—a complete overview, like military surveillance. “I was a little bit tired of the idea of photography allowing you to see everything,” Barbieri says. “After 9/11 the world had become a little bit blurred because things that seemed impossible happened. My desire was to look at the city again.”

He began the Site Specific project in Rome, before moving on to Amman, Jordan; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; and Shanghai, China. He achieves the distinctive look by photographing from a helicopter using a tilt-shift lens—a method, he says, that “allows me to choose what I really like in focus: like in a written page, we don’t read [it as an] image but one line at a time.” Along with the still photographs, which are exhibited as enormous prints, Barbieri has been making short 35mm films. New York—not surprisingly—is next on his list of cities to tackle.

But so far it’s the Las Vegas photographs in which an innate sense of unreality collides most strikingly with Barbieri’s projected vision. The city’s simulated monuments are made to look artificial, in total defiance of their reality. For Barbieri it is “the city as an avatar of itself.”


http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20060116/model-world
(text and pictures)

TILT-SHIFT PHOTOGRAPHY

making photos of real places look like toy models;::: these are my first 2 tests.

RESEARCH: TRUCOLD

Blast Theory The group makes collaborative, interdisciplinary work that is highly innovative in its process and execution.

TRUCOLD is a video work shot at night on the streets of London and - during a heavy fog - in Karlsruhe in Germany. The work comes out of Blast Theory's interest in physical displacement, amnesia and time travel and ties directly into other urban projects Can You See Me Now? and Uncle Roy All Around You, focusing in on the city at night and the gaps between what is real and what is fictional. The group are interested in the power of the viewer or participant to fictionalise their surroundings and to experience things which are not really there. Lengthy shots with a fixed camera unveil the passage of time on the landscape. By partially erasing the ephemeral passage of traffic and people, the video presents the urban fabric as monolithic, expansive and subject to minute shifts that might otherwise pass unmarked. While superficially absent people are in fact constantly present on the margins: a running man appears as blur, another is briefly reflected in a marble column.

The work also plays with the limits and effects of technology: while reminiscent of time lapse techniques, the footage is in fact unfolding in real time. Shot on mini DV the shutter speed has been slowed to one third of a second in order to be able film in such low light. The video is filled with digital artefacts as the camera struggles with the conditions: pixellation, streaks of anomalous colour and lens flare. Some images seem computer generated. The act of image capture itself is bordering on entropy.

The city appears empty, open, receptive to meaning and yet there is attendant threat caused by that very absence. Both the quotidian and the mythic exists alongside one another.

TRUCOLD was made for the Biennale of Sydney in 2002 and was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It has since been featured in a number of exhibitions and film and video festivals in Europe, Asia and the United States.

http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_trucold.html (image and text)

This video is TRUCOLD, the video made for the sydney biennale in 2002. It is like what i want to do for this project.

http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/mov/mov_tc.html

ELSEWHERE/MAPPING