Archive for October 2022
GoPro, Circa the 1960s

GoPro, Circa the 1960s

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Back in the olden days, you just tied your cameraman right to the car:

GoPro 1960s

Looks almost as goofy as Google Glass. Legendary F1 driver Jackie Stewart wore this stills-only proto-GoPro at the Monaco Grand Prix in 1966 (though not during the actual race):

Gopro 1960s Stewart

Stewart ended up winning that race. I believe Stewart is also the model for this contraption, which looks like a film camera counterbalanced with a battery pack?

Gopro 1960s Stewart

That couldn’t have been comfortable. For some reason, neither of Stewart’s helmet cams are recognized by Wikipedia as being the first documented helmet cam, which is instead attributed to a motorcycle race in 1986:

Motorcycle Helmet Cam

Update: Another early use of the helmet cam comes from the world of skydiving. Here’s Bob Sinclair with a camera setup from 1961:

Gopro 1960s Parachute

(thx, david)

Update: Not even a bulky taped-up helmet camera can keep Steve McQueen from looking cool:

GoPro 1960s McQueen

Well, he just barely looks cool. McQueen wore the helmet during the filming of 1971’s Le Mans. While researching this, I came across another film featuring McQueen that used helmet cams to get footage: 1971s On Any Sunday, a documentary about motorcycle racing. (via @jackshafer)

Tags:Formula One    GoPro    Jackie Stewart    photography    racing    sports    Steve McQueen   

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The World's Best Audition (for Elliott in E.T.)

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I’ve never seen a better audition tape than this improvised scene by Henry Thomas for the part of Elliott in E.T.

The tears were inspired by thoughts of his dead dog. And the final line from Spielberg is gold. (via @Colossal)

Tags:E.T.    Henry Thomas    movies    Steven Spielberg    video   

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How Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2

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Taken from the Studio Stories series included on the Blu-ray versions of Toy Story 1 & 2, here’s a short story about how Toy Story 2 was almost erased before the film could be rendered for theaters.

Woody’s hat disappeared. And then his boots disappeared. And then as we kept checking, he disappeared entirely. Woody’s gone.

(via tested)

Update: Over at Quora, Oren Jacob (the guy in the video) explains in more detail what happened.

First, it wasn’t multiple terabytes of information. Neither all the rendered frames, nor all the data necessary to render those frames in animation, model, shaders, set, and lighting data files was that size back then.

A week prior to driving across the bridge in a last ditch attempt to recover the show (depicted pretty accurately in the video above) we had restored the film from backups within 48 hours of the /bin/rm -r -f *, run some validation tests, rendered frames, somehow got good pictures back and no errors, and invited the crew back to start working. It took another several days of the entire crew working on that initial restoral to really understand that the restoral was, in fact, incomplete and corrupt. Ack. At that point, we sent everyone home again and had the come-to-Jesus meeting where we all collectively realized that our backup software wasn’t dishing up errors properly (a full disk situation was masking them, if my memory serves), our validation software also wasn’t dishing up errors properly (that was written very hastily, and without a clean state to start from, was missing several important error conditions), and several other factors were compounding our lack of concrete, verifiable information.

The only prospect then was to roll back about 2 months to the last full backup that we thought might work. In that meeting, Galyn mentioned she might have a copy at her house. So we went home to get that machine, and you can watch the video for how that went…

Tags:movies    Oren Jacob    Pixar    Toy Story 2    video   

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Dorothea Lange's Photos of Japanese Americans' Imprisonment During WWII

Dorothea Lange's Photos of Japanese Americans' Imprisonment During WWII

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Lange Japanese Internment

Lange Japanese Internment

In 1942, the US government hired Dorothea Lange (of Migrant Mother fame) to take photos of the removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Although Lange quit after a few months because government censors wouldn’t let her shoot images of barbed wire and the bayonets on guards’ guns, she took hundreds of photos documenting this shameful moment in American history.

Famous for her forlorn images of Dust Bowl America, this pioneering female photographer was hired by the War Relocation Authority in 1942 to document the removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans. Although her skill at candid portraiture was unparalleled, “Lange was an odd choice, given her leftist politics and strong sympathy for victims of racial discrimination,” writes scholar Megan Asaka. The position was a challenging one for Lange as well. “Appalled by the forced exile, she confided to a Quaker protestor that she was guilt stricken to be working for a federal government that could treat its citizens so unjustly.”

The WRA initially gave Lange little instruction about where and what to shoot, but controlled and censored her while she was at work. When documenting life inside the assembly centers and concentration camps, she was prohibited from taking shots of barbed wire and bayonets. Unable to tolerate this censorship and her own conflicted feelings about the work, Lange quit after just a few months of employment with the WRA.

Less ashamed at what they’d done and more worried about PR backlash, the government embargoed Lange’s photos until 1972.

If this all makes you think of some recent comments about Muslims from a certain Republican presidential candidate, history may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

Update: Ansel Adams also took dozens of photos of the Japanese American interment camp at Manzanar.

Adams Japanese Internment Camp

So did photographer Toyo Miyatake, who was among the prisoners at Manzanar.

Miyatake Japanese Internment

The exclusion order forced Miyatake, his wife and four children, to the concentration camp at Manzanar. He was able to store his photographic equipment but managed to smuggle a camera lens and film plate holder into the camp against government orders. Miyatake told his son Archie that he felt it was his duty to document camp life. An Issei carpenter in camp constructed a box to house the lens, and Miyatake was able to get film into camp by way of a hardware salesman and former client. The photographer eventually asked camp director Ralph Merritt if he could set up a photo studio, and Merritt, who learned about Miyatake from Edward Weston, consented with the provision that Miyatake only load and set the camera, and a Caucasian assistant snap the shutter. Eventually, that restriction was lifted, and Miyatake was designated official camp photographer, and granted the freedom to take photos of everyday life at Manzanar.

Miyatake and Adams met at the camp and began a collaboration. Lange and Adams were friends — he printed Migrant Mother for her — and she was instrumental in convincing Adams to document Manzanar. But she was also critical of his detached approach:

In 1961, Lange said about Adams’s taking landscape pictures at the Manzanar Relocation Center: “It was shameful. That’s Ansel. He doesn’t have much sense about these things.”

(thx, @gen and samuel)

Update: Anchor Editions made a page with dozens of Lange’s photos paired with quotes from contemporary sources about the camps.

Tags:Ansel Adams    Dorothea Lange    photography    racism    Toyo Miyatake    USA    war    World War II   

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The Putter Togetherer

The Putter Togetherer

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A person who makes scissors by hand is called a putter, short for putter togetherer. The Putter is a four-minute silent film by Shaun Bloodworth that shows putter Cliff Denton making scissors.

You can order a pair of these handmade scissors at Ernest Wright & Sons; a pair of 6-inch desk scissors are £23, but they come with a lifetime guarantee and I bet you won’t find a better pair of scissors anywhere. The wonderful music in that video is by The Black Dog. (via colossal)

Tags:Cliff Denton    Shaun Bloodworth    The Black Dog    video   

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The Surprising Ages of the Founding Fathers on July 4, 1776

The Surprising Ages of the Founding Fathers on July 4, 1776

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For the Journal of the American Revolution, Todd Andrlik compiled a list of the ages of the key participants in the Revolutionary War as of July 4, 1776. Many of them were surprisingly young:

Marquis de Lafayette, 18
James Monroe, 18
Gilbert Stuart, 20
Aaron Burr, 20
Alexander Hamilton, 21
Betsy Ross, 24
James Madison, 25

This is kind of blowing my mind…because of the compression of history, I’d always assumed all these people were around the same age. But in thinking about it, all startups need young people…Hamilton, Lafayette, and Burr were perhaps the Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg of the War. Some more ages, just for reference:

Thomas Jefferson, 33
John Adams, 40
Paul Revere, 41
George Washington, 44
Samuel Adams, 53

The oldest prominent participant in the Revolution, by a wide margin, was Benjamin Franklin, who was 70 years old on July 4, 1776. Franklin was a full two generations removed from the likes of Madison and Hamilton. But the oldest participant in the war was Samuel Whittemore, who fought in an early skirmish at the age of 80. I’ll let Wikipedia take it from here:

Whittemore was in his fields when he spotted an approaching British relief brigade under Earl Percy, sent to assist the retreat. Whittemore loaded his musket and ambushed the British from behind a nearby stone wall, killing one soldier. He then drew his dueling pistols and killed a grenadier and mortally wounded a second. By the time Whittemore had fired his third shot, a British detachment reached his position; Whittemore drew his sword and attacked. He was shot in the face, bayoneted thirteen times, and left for dead in a pool of blood. He was found alive, trying to load his musket to fight again. He was taken to Dr. Cotton Tufts of Medford, who perceived no hope for his survival. However, Whittemore lived another 18 years until dying of natural causes at the age of 98.

!!!

Tags:history    lists    Revolutionary War    Samuel Whittemore    Todd Andrlik    USA    war   

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A Brief Sabbatical Update

A Brief Sabbatical Update

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It’s been about five months since I announced I was taking a sabbatical and lately I’ve been getting messages from members and readers asking what’s been going on. While I don’t have anything specific to say about how it’s been going (other than I’m well and that I’ve been mostly and blissfully offline), I did want to share a brief update on my plans for the fall:

I will be returning to work on the site sometime in November or December. I don’t know exactly what shape that will take, but it will resemble what I was doing before I paused back in May: posting interesting links and things to share with you on this here website. You know, fine hypertext products.

In the meantime, I hope you’ve been enjoying some of the timeless posts from the archive that are being posted to the front page — just a few each week. Finishing that republishing system was an enjoyable little sabbatical task…it was fun to dip my toes back into programming.

Anyhoo, I’ll see you soon. -jason

Tags: Jason Kottke   kottke.org

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