With today’s sad news, I thought I’d show you some snapshots I took while rummaging through Ray Harryhausen’s garage. As someone who is constantly trying to reinvent myself, I found that Ray’s time capsule told me that Ray was perfectly happy being who he was, all of his life. We will sorely miss his presence in our lives.

It’s 1938 on the rooftop of a downtown Los Angeles building, the owners of a penthouse apartment with a chewing gum view of the snowcapped San Gabriel mountains (very Wrigley,) closed the door and walked away. For seventy five years, the apartment sat empty. With downtime during a photo shoot setup, playfully examining the rooftop, I began turning door knobs. One opened….

The first indication that a bit of mystery was involved, the household appliances sat where they had been the last time they were used, the GE Refrigerating Machine keeping the leftovers cool, as our penthouse apartment dwellers looked down at the neon marquees announcing the premieres of Snow White, Gone With The Wind, The Wizard of Oz. The maid’s quarters offered easy access to the then exceedingly luxurious spoils of a machine that actually washed your clothes for you!

Looking at the bathroom, I realized that life back in time wouldn’t have seemed much different from today. Everybody poops.

Even the circuit breakers in a closet off of the maid’s room exuded coolosity:

It seems there might have been a spitting problem, as this sign on the sun deck evinces:

From the 1938 patent date, the air conditioning unit on the roof must have been the latest and greatest. Why would they leave?

Imagine this view at night, with the neon lit.

The Eastern Columbia department store would have made for convenient shopping, though today it stands as the finest example of Art Deco era architecture surviving in Los Angeles.

If our mysterious tenants needed an excuse to stay, this million-dollar view would have been worth, in those days, over seven hundred dollars!.

Although world war would effect the City of Angeles a few years later, requiring roof light black-outs during air-raid (tests), I think the pano view of the penthouse best explains the reasons for deserting this magical loft: the pipes that travel through the apartment walls reflect laws that arose in the depression era that required high-rise residences and hotels to retrofit fire sprinkler systems, and unfortunately the only way to make that happen was to seal off the rooftop apartment, and leave it alone for us to discover.

Check it out on Google’s Mapdom:

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For any who are students of motion picture production design, this is a lesson in set layout and logistics. Precisely where the buildings are situated probably hinged on where the sun would traverse the sky during the shoot, and there’s likely some involvement with the creek wash to the north west.

But agh, the results speak for themselves, each and every picture had a bizarre lomo effect that grew on me, and I now treasure the resulting ruination. Here’s Jar Jar on the deck of an aircraft carrier for some reason:

Then a quick photographer grabs a shot of Qui-gon preparing to decimate a hoard of tourists:

Ah, but the ghost of Darth Maul warps to his hide-out in Bryce Canyon National Park, his body reassembled in spirit form for some reason:

Liam Neason appears to do battle at the Grand Canyon, for some reason:

Then baby Anakin returns in spirit form to save the day. I guess he’s a ghost now too:

Industrial Light and Magic, with its sea of midichlorian fueled interns, could not have done a better job than this. On a scale of one to five, five being awesome, I give the Tiger Star Wars Character Camera a thumbs-up.

After a few hours of thinking, the program returned the best 3D model of the set that could be derived from the view available using the film frames. The amount and quality of the data that can be computed very much depends on the image quality and style of camera movement used in a particular scene. I noticed that Peter Jackson seemed to lean towards a pan and tilt from single point, meaning there is very little 3d-viewpoint change because the camera is rotating on the “nodal point” of the lens. He may have done this as a style choice, or it may have something to do with the movie being shot in 3D with two cameras. This type of movement is not useful as the photogrammetry algorithm depends on detecting parallax differences among frames, so a dolly or crane movment works best. The end result will also depend on whether the overall scene depicts multiple viewpoints of the set so that it can be filled in to cover as many directions as possible in the 3D model. Here’s the resulting Maya model render. I’ve removed a tree from this view for clarity.

The result might be used for constructing a game level, or 3D-printed to create a miniature scene. It might even be used by the film makers themselves in order to add effects that would interact with the physical dimensions of the set and match up perfectly with the original scene footage.

-In Iceland with thanks to Tom Cruise and company.

We purchased the Cubify to help with a new portrait lighting system we’re developing. To jump start the learning process, though, I decided to print all of those missing lens caps and tripod feet and other little bits of kit that have wandered away. My first print is of a cap for an old Russian screw-mount that I use with an E-P1. I bought the lens from the Lomography store in Soho. I fired up Pro/Engineer and minutes later had a over-built cap design that threw in everything I could think of as far as styling, including giant letters indicating the lens’ filter thread size for some reason. I just wanted to push the thing. I realize now that I’m going to have to relearn all of the industrial design and injection-mold engineering knowledge that I once used daily; thing like wall thicknesses, stress fillets, tolerances etc. If this is going to work.

The first attempt at building was a mess, I learned that even though I was certain that the Pro/e model was clean, the data MUST be run through the repair module in the Cubify software before printing. Once past that, the print process seemed rather routine, which I think is a good thing, 3D printing was once a black-art. The first successful print came out mis-sized, I’m not sure if there us some shrinkage factor that needs to be considered, (UPDATE: on my unit, a103% scale is required for every part) though for now I simply scaled the part and hit print once more and the result is a practically perfect replacement cap.

The default supplied material is neon green for some reason, so I’ll have to order a black print cartridge once I’ve got the process down.

Here are some new feet for my I printed for my tripod, the originals were sucked away in some quicksand-like mucky muck on the Vancouver set of Man of Steel. I could have ordered new ones from Manfrotto in Italy, but frankly I like these 3d printed ones more.