Monday, January 23, 2012

Monday Movies - Star Wars Uncut: Director's Cut


Screen grab from Star Wars Uncut: Director's Cut
Just one movie for you today, and it’s great as it is bizarre, surreal, and funny.
In 2009, Vimeo developer Casey Pugh had a dream: to create an entire remake of the original Star Wars: A New Hope using only 15 second fan-made clips; they could recreate the scenes whichever way they wanted, whether using action figures, beer bottles, animation or dogs. Now, a 2010 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Creative Achievement In Interactive Media later, the entire crowd-sourced project has been completed.


You can see the completed fan-made Star Wars Uncut: Director's Cut, below. The two hour film includes animation, live action, puppets, Lego figures, and the weirdest collection of 15 second clips ever assembled into one delightful pastiche that pays tribute to George Lucas’s groundbreaking film.


Thanks to Gothamist for bringing this to my attention.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Things You Discover Walking – Clifton Hill Shot Tower


Clifton Hill Shot Tower looms over local homes


Have you ever wondered how they made those little round balls that passed as bullets in the olden days? You know the type I mean. Small, round, lead balls that had to be rammed down the barrels of primitive muskets and pistols, before they could be fired at an assailant or enemy combatant. Well, today’s Things You Discover Walking entry provides the answer.

A couple of kilometres from the home I am currently house sitting (in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy North), is a tall chimney-like structure that towers high over the neighbourhood of Clifton Hill. A little research reveals the column to be the Clifton Hill Shot Tower, a structure that was first erected in 1882.
...
Would you like to hazard a guess at the number of bricks that went into
the towers construction?
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But what exactly is a ‘shot tower’?

“A shot tower is a tower designed for the production of shot balls by freefall of molten lead, which is then caught in a water basin. The shot is used for projectiles in firearms.” ~ Wikipedia

Let’s examine this process in more detail. Inside the shot tower, lead was heated until molten before it was passed through a copper sieve high up in the tower (presumably, the furnace to melt the lead was located at the top of the tower). As the molten lead dropped through the air it solidified as it fell, and the surface tension generated by the fall, formed tiny spherical balls.

The partially cooled balls dropped into a pool of water at the bottom of the tower where they were left to cool down completely. And that in a nut shell is how lead shot used to be made before the development of modern bullets.

To make larger shot sizes, a copper sieve with larger holes was used. However, the maximum size of the lead shot was limited by the height of the tower, because larger shot sizes needed to fall farther to give them time to cool.

Originally, molten lead was poured into moulds of various sizes to create lead shot, but as you can imagine, this was a long, slow, time consuming process. The advent of the shot tower sped up the process considerably until even newer modern methods were developed. 

Clifton Hill Shot Tower
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The Clifton Hill Shot Tower rises 49 metres (160 ft), and can be found on the corner of Alexandra Parade and Copper Lane. The tower (the tallest shot tower ever built in Australia), was operated by the Coops family, who also managed the Coops Shot Tower. Remarkably, this tower has also been preserved and can be seen inside the Melbourne Central Shopping Centre. Both towers are on the Victorian Heritage Register.

Modern methods for producing lead shot for shotgun shells, have of course done away for the need for shot towers, but many examples of these fascinating relics of a bygone age still survive.

Two of the oldest towers still standing are the Jackson Ferry Shot Tower in Wythe County, Virginia. This was built in the 1790s, and is now part of a state park and open to the public during the tourist season. Another is the Chester Shot Tower, in Boughton, England. This tower, built in 1799, is the oldest surviving shot tower in the Britain. Other examples still survive in countries as diverse as Germany, Finland, New Zealand, and elsewhere.

Clifton Hill Shot Tower
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So there you have it: the Clifton Hill Shot Tower. It now stands like a silent sentinel on a nondescript corner just metres from the entrance to Melbourne’s Eastern Freeway.

It would be wonderful to see the tower turned into more than just an old relic from a bygone era – I’m sure the view from the top would be well worth the climb – but sadly, money, politics, and planning constraints will no doubt conspire to stop that.

Monday, January 16, 2012

Monday Movies – The Vanishing El


The elevated line at Broadway and 125th Street

If you are a keen moviegoer like I am, you will almost certainly be familiar with the elevated railway lines that are used to such great effect in films like The French Connection, Saturday Night Fever, and the opening credits of Welcome Back Kotter. While most of the elevated lines in New York City (colloquially referred to as the ‘El’), have long disappeared from Manhattan, wonderful examples of these amazing engineering works can still be seen in Queens and Brooklyn. However, a short section of elevated line for the ‘1’ Train still soars high above Broadway and 125th Street in Harlem.

Manhattan’s most famous surviving section of elevated line today must surely be the formerly abandoned, by now newly renovated west side line. This has undergone a new lease of life, and been reborn as the incredibly popular High Line (see Walking The High Line, Street View Comes to The High Line, and here...). All of which serves to introduce today’s series of Monday Movies featuring the former Third Avenue El.

If Things Could Talk: The Vanishing ‘El’ [10:00]


As the name implies, the Third Avenue El, ran the length of Manhattan’s Third Avenue before crossing over into the Bronx. The first segments of the line opened in Manhattan in 1878, and service continued before the line was eventually shut down in stages – beginning with the Manhattan sections in the 1950s – before the complete shut down of the Bronx section in 1973.

The Third Avenue El was featured in a number of films, including The Lost Weekend (1945),The Naked City (1948), On the Town (1949), The Killer That Stalked New York (1950), and On the Bowery (1956).

The 3rd Avenue El [10:39]

In this film a beatnik photographer with a tripod, a stumbling drunk from the old Bowery, a giddy little girl travelling with her father, and a couple on a romantic excursion help create a loose narrative of life on the old El.


See more films at: http://www.weirdovideo.com 


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