The film, the book, the app

I want need an iPad, ‘cos…

It’s not often that a film precedes a book, but it happened with the Academy Award winning animated short film for all bibliophiles – ‘The fantastic flying books of Mr Morris Lessmore’. The story follows reader and writer Morris Lessmore and his custodianship of a magical library of flying books. It was created using miniatures, computer CG & stop-motion animation, and traditional hand-drawn techniques.

Wonderful quirky work with books

 I first saw this on YouTube, and now the actual book has been published as a hardcover children’s picture book ‘The fantastic flying books of Mr Morris Lessmore’ by William Joyce.

There is also an iTunes app by Moonbot Studios (Moonbot is the storytelling and animation collective co-founded by Joyce) to accompany the book/film, which as iTunes states “blurs the line between picture books and animated film”.

From the app which lets you draw, play piano & more

 ‘The fantastic flying books of Morris Lessmore’ is a story of people who devote their lives to books and books who return the favour. Morris Lessmore is a poignant, humorous allegory about the curative power of stories and how they can positively affect our lives.

The real book

William Joyce began working on the story in 1999, as a tribute to the late Bill Morris the soft-spoken, dry-witted pioneer of library promotions. The hurricane Katrina devastated Joyce’s home state and interrupted the story’s progress. Joyce saw firsthand the curative power of stories when he visited displaced children reading donated books in the shelters.

Setting the scene - stop-motion miniature

And even better, the story has also been released as an augmented reality app by Moonbot Studios, the IMAG•N•O•TRON, which brings the pages of the book to life!

It starts with a real or digital book! Once you have your copy of ‘The fantastic flying books of Mr. Morris Lessmore’,  users can view the picture book through the IMAG•N•O•TRON app using an iPad 2/3 or iPhone 4+ camera, you get swept up in a storm, Humpty Dumpty befriends you and you get a sneak peek into a part of Lessmore’s world not shown in the book or movie.  Check it out on this Vimeo video -

See the IMAG•N•O•TRON in action! from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

To download the IMAG•N•O•TRON app

Integrating such innovative and exciting technology with books is awesome and awe-inspiring – what's next?

I believe it says something profound that a short film and app are about the preciousness of the paper book.

Merry Christmas

Happy Christmas to All

An alternative view on the traditional tree.

Detroit - now and then

I've spoken before about posts combining aspects that interest me, and WebUrbanist has produced a 'now-and-then' with abandonment!

A second floor hallway

 Now & Then: hybrid images of a deserted school in Detroit   In this post DetroitUrbex takes documentation to new depths (and heights) in this series of collages that show historical use and present conditions in abandoned structures through the lens of students and teachers overlaid with the haunting shots of an urban explorer.

Cass Technical High School was founded in 1907, and a grand building built in 1919. A fire in 2007 led to its demolition in 2011. School continues in an additional facility erected in 2004.

Check out the serious warping of the basketball floor in the gym, due to moisture damage.

DetroitUrbex has a whole site on exploring and understanding the city of Detroit, with images, interactive 3D models, even tours.

The library's decline from the 90s

 

Argus bomb site

While I was in Melbourne waiting for the train, I had time to check out the abandoned Argus building.

The Argus was Melbourne's first newspaper, an amalgamation of a number of early colonial papers including the Port Phillip Patriot and the Melbourne Advertiser.
Its readership filled a compromise between the more conservative 'Age' and the sensationalism of 'The Sun'.

The Argus newspaper was established in 1846, and with its partner The Australiasian (est 1864), was housed in the Argus building on the corner of Elizabeth and La Trobe Streets, from 1926 (the foundation stone was laid in 1924).

It closed in 1957 when sold to Keith Murdoch’s 'Herald & Weekly Times', and the building was later purchased by the Stamoulis family.

The building is an 8 storey stripped classical combination of neo-classical Beaux Arts style with Chicagoesque and Moderne influences, complete with a regal classical tower. La Trobe University purchased it for $8 million in 2004, and apparently spent $34+ million gutting the building. The building had lead-paint and was riddled with asbestos. They then sold it for $15 million in 2010 to the Melbourne Institute of Technology. MIT intend to convert the site into an educational facility.

Now a large portion of the roof and several sections of floors are missing. There is exposed reo and rusty iron beams. Water has damaged parts. Melbourne City Lord Mayor Robert Doyle declared it one of Melbourne’s “bomb sites” -said it was a building of ''historic significance, but it is deteriorating as we look at it and I want to give them the strong message that we will not tolerate the tactic of allowing a building to deteriorate to a point where you can't do anything with it''.
The building is classified by the National Trust and is on the Victorian Heritage Register.

 The Argus building is hosting the Melbourne Music Week a 9 day program of events. MMW with the Melbourne City Council have a short-term lease for a festival site of performance, dining, learning and socialising with bands, DJs, film screenings, vintage clothing stall and more.

Unfortunately most of The Argus building remains off limits, the two lower floors have been renovated to allow 400 people upstairs and 800 people downstairs in the temporary concert hall, which will host both local and international acts.

"Be free"

Here's a short YouTube video of the site and MMW, which shows the bare building and gives a better idea of its dimensions.

Fire and brimstone

A few weeks ago I created a post regarding Shawn Glover’s Drawbridge photos, but I was drawn to Shawn’s work with ‘now and then’ of San Francisco "The Earthquake blend". The colour photographs of modern-day scenes in the city contrast with the black-and-white images of destruction – buildings half-collapsed, damaged roads revealing yawning subterranean pits, facades blackened, trolleys smashed. Shawn has painstakingly researched and constructed images reminiscent of Sergey Larenkov’s “Ghosts of WWII series (see my ‘Penetrating the layers of time’ post). 

To put these photos together, Shawn created a catalogue of historical photos that looked to have potential to be blended. “Unfortunately most of these photos end up on the digital cutting room floor because there’s simply no way to get the same photo today because either a building or a tree is in the way. Once I get a good location, I get everything lined up just right. My goal is to stand in the exact spot where the original photographer stood. Doing this needs to take into account equivalent focal length, how the lens was shifted, light conditions, etc. I take plenty of shots, each nudged around a bit at each location. Just moving one foot to the left changes everything.” His original idea was to tear away a piece of the modern photo to expose the 1906 photo, but after playing around a bit, everything seemed more interesting when the two were softly blended together.

Shawn kept running into delays. In the case of the Valencia St. Hotel, he had to return to the scene on Valencia Street four times before managing to get it right. There’s quite a bit of conflicting information of exactly where this building once stood.

A variety of photos taken from April 18, 1906 to 1907 of the devastation of San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, that give a well-rounded depiction of the city at the time. Luckily photography was a common hobby by 1906 and thousands of photos have survived to this day.

The San Francisco earthquake struck on April 18^th 1906 with 42 seconds of intense shaking estimated at 7.8 on the Richter scale. Buildings fell, sinkholes in the streets opened up, the ground liquefied, railroad tracks bent, and collapsing bricks crushed cable cars. However, it was the out-of-control fires that did 90% of the destruction. Over 30 fires, caused by ruptured gas mains, destroyed approximately 25,000 buildings on 490 city blocks, many fires were started when firefighters used dynamite to demolish buildings to create firebreaks, which resulted in the destruction of more than 50% of the buildings that would have otherwise survived. The fires burned for four days and nights.

The city was in disarray. Federal troops and police had orders to shoot and kill looters. Thousands of tents and temporary relief houses went up to house the 20,000 displaced people.

A cable car heads towards the California Street incline while shocked residents walk aimlessly through street amidst the devastation. The tower in the background belongs to the Old St Marys Church, which survived the quake but was gutted by fire. It was rebuilt and still stands at the corner of California Street and Grant Avenue.

Happy tourists pass by the Fairmont Hotel, on top of Nob Hill, which still stands, but was destroyed inside from the fires. Built in 1902-06 the opulent Fairmont had not yet opened at the time of the quake though the interior furnishings were there. It finally opened exactly one year after the earthquake struck.

People cross Market Street in front of the destroyed Hearst Building. The building caught fire at noon on the 18^th, and the front wall facade was all that remained standing. The dynamiting of buildings started at 2.30pm.

Pedestrians cross Jones St towards a pile of rubble on Market Street. The Hibernia Bank building on the McAllister Street corner is burned out, but still standing strong. It was repaired and temporarily housed the Harbour Police after the quake. It was restored to bank use, then again became a police substation when the Hibernia Bank closed in the late 1980s.

A woman opens the door to her Mercedes in the fish wholesaler’s district on Sacramento Street while horses killed by falling rubble lie in the street. After the original photo was taken, the entire area was burned out.

Two girls stand before the partially destroyed Sharon Building in Golden Gate Park. Built in 1888, the Romanesque sandstone building was a canteen for children visiting the park. It was damaged by fire in 1974, and is now an art studio.

Cars travel down S. Van Ness, which has buckled after the quake. The fires reached Van Ness Avenue on the 20^th

A bicyclist rides towards the fallen Valencia Street Hotel and a huge sinkhole that has opened up in the street. The hotel on the west side of Valencia Street between 18^th & 19^th Streets sank one storey into the sinkhole, which was a filled-in swamp known as Lake Coppin. Up to 200 people may have died in the hotel, many drowned as a major water-main broke as the hotel sank.
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People walk up California Street amid charred scraps of lumber. The dark bricks of the Old St Marys tower is visible behind the modern day woman.

People stroll by the original adobe Mission Dolores which survived, while the brick Gothic Revival church (built 1876) next door was destroyed. The Mission District is up the hill and the fires reached there on the 21^st. The Notre Dame Convent across the road was dynamited, but the fire jumped the road to the church and damaged to the extent it was razed. The fire was halted almost on the Mission doorstep. Dedicated in 1791 the Mission Dolores is now the oldest surviving structure in San Francisco. A new grand basilica was built on the church site in 1913-18.
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Horse carriages and cars park in front of Lafayette Park while a destroyed city looms in the background. Lafayette Park encompasses a four-block area bounded by Sacramento Street to the south, Laguna Street to the west, Washington Street to the north, and Gough Street to the east. More than half the city was homeless, and 11 relief camps were set up in public parks.

A double delight

OMG lighthouses AND abandonment! It is WebUrbanist's "Lights Out!: seven more eerie abandoned lighthouses"
7 scenic sentinels slowly succumbing to the endless onslaught of wind and waves stand – barely – as solitary reminders of a time when fog-piercing lighthouse beams guided wayward mariners from the cold clutches of the devil and the deep blue sea. Often built in isolated locations beset by the harshest of environments, these relics of a more romantic age are gradually giving up the ghost, ravaged by the same seas they sought to make safer for sailors. Last one to leave, please shut the door and turn out the light.

Mys Aniva Lighthouse on the rocky outcrop

 Mys Aniva lighthouse, built under extremely difficult conditions on a formerly jagged rock just off the southeastern-most cape of Sakhalin island, Russia. Firstly, Japan ordered the lighthouse built in the late 1930s when Sakhalin was divided between that country and the USSR. The Soviets seized the whole of Sakhalin at the end of World War II, they installed a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator to supply electricity to the lamp. The fall of communism in the early 1990s led to a decade of near-chaos with funds in short supply. The Mys Aniva lighthouse, isolated though it was and is, was looted, ransacked and abandoned.

Looking derelict Grand Harbor Lighthouse

The Grand Harbour Lighthouse and attached keeper’s house at Fish Fluke Point on Ross Island, New Brunswick, Canada opened in the fall of 1879 and has been in a state of slow-motion collapse since the station was closed in 1963. The once-picturesque lighthouse’s degeneration was accelerated by the great Groundhog Day Gale of 1976, but the wood-framed complex hangs on.

Klein Curacao

Klein Curacao Lighthouse on the Caribbean island of Curacao was constructed in 1850 on the tiny, (3 km square) island situated 10 kms south-east of the mother island. In 1877 a powerful hurricane destroyed the original lighthouse and in 1879 a stronger replacement was built. It was subsequently storm-damaged and repaired again in 1913. Though the lighthouse had been abandoned and left to decay, the light itself was recently reactivated and an automatic solar-powered LED beacon was installed.

Though shattered by two decades of on and off civil war, the city of Mogadishu in Somalia has a long and prosperous history based on sea trading. The Mogadishu Lighthouse was built in the 19th century by Italian colonisers. Its light long dimmed and its open spiral staircase on the verge of collapse, the lighthouse ruins serve as a shady retreat for fishermen.
 

The remains of the Mogadishu Lighthouses's spiral staircase

Great Isaac Cay Lighthouse was built in 1859 on tiny Great Isaac Cay in the Bahamas. The rusting 152ft tall tower is surrounded by a group of decrepit and decaying outbuildings abandoned after the last two keepers mysteriously vanished in 1969. The lighthouse still functions using an automatic light. It has acquired a reputation for being haunted by the ghosts of shipwrecked ship passengers - when the full moon shines, the spectral shades of a mother and child shipwrecked off the island in the late 19th century can be heard bemoaning their fate.

As always photos, information and 2 more lighthouses at WebUrbanist 
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Lots of reasons to celebrate

This isn't self congratulations just a big thankyou to the audience out there

Yesterday this blog received it's 50,000th visitor

Now it's onwards & upwards and let's crack 100,000!

Book + child = Love

 'The lonely book' by Kate Bernheimer and illustrated by Chris Sheban.

Once there was a brand-new book that arrived at the library. The book loved to be read and it was popular with many children who would check it out (and it hardly ever slept at the library), then it time it becomes old and worn and the increasingly shabby library book grows lonely until, that is, Alice a young girl rediscovers it and doesn't mind that its old and missing the last page ("This is the most beautiful book I've ever read", so she put back 3 new books so she was able to take the lonely book home instead). It is the enchanting story she loves and she always imagined a happy ending on the missing last page. Alice reads the book every night and takes it to show-and-tell - the book had never felt so beloved. But disaster strikes when a library volunteer thinks the book is meant for the Book Sale, and the book enters its loneliest period in the basement. At the Book Sale Alice re-discovers the book and it goes back to her bedroom,where the book knows its always-and-forever home.
This is one of those cross-over books  - the size and dimensions of a picture book with the text and complexity of junior fiction, and beautifully illustrated by Chris Sheban.
The moral of the story -

its not just the new books which need to be borrowed

be very careful when weeding - don't judge the book by its cover

children can still have a meaningful and loving relationship with a real book

Ghost architecture

It's a post from WebUrbanist - "Ghost architecture: building demolition photo composites"

More than “now & then”, this is now, then and in-between.

Andrew Evans from Philadelphia, creates pictures that give a new perspective on the processes of urban deconstruction, showing before, during and after images of once-proud civic structures.

What really brings these haunting black-and-white images to life is that ‘three-step aspect’ – not just the building being there and gone, with its surrounding context, but with the demolition equipment, semi-demolished rooms and falling rubble part of the shot.

Prominent Philadelphia captures include: The National Building, destroyed to expand the Odd Fellows Temple, Pennsylvania Convention Center, the Pennsylvania Railroad power plant and the Philadelphia Convention Hall and Civic Center.
 

Adam's Mark Hotel, 2006

 Adam’s Mark Hotel built in 1965, had more than 500 guest rooms and functions spaces over 23 floors, it was purchased by Target Corporation as the site for a new store. The hotel closed in January 2005, and was demolished in 2006.
 

The Spectrum, 2011

The Spectrum, a sports and entertainment arena opened in 1967 and was demolished 2010-11, its last event was a Pearl Jam concert. It is now a parking lot, but there are plans for a 300 room hotel on the site.

Convention Hall, 2005

 The Convention Hall or Civic Center, the art deco building was built in 1930. The Beatles and The Stones both played there. After The Spectrum was built, the Hall became obsolete, and finally pulled down in 2005.
 

Mt Olive Church, 2012

The Greater Mt Olives Church, over 100 years old, on the corner of 19^th and Fitzwater Streets was demolished in 2012, to erect 5 new single-family apartments with rear parking.
 

Gilbert Building

The Gilbert Building was a 8 storey Neo-classic commercial office building built in 1910 and demolished in 2007 to allow expansion of the Convention Center.
 

Pennsylvania Railroad Power Station, 2009

The Pennsylvania railroad power plant was built in 1909, and is now a condominium. The smoke stacks toppling into a cloud of dust is a marvellous image, and I love the transient nature of the cranes in some of the other photos.

“Andrew Evans is an architect by training who is fascinated by construction and destruction alike. He is a lifelong Philadelphian and resides in southwest center city.” You can see more of his Flickr photos. 
 

Deserted Double Decker

Permanently parked in the inhospitable Strzelecki desert, just off the road near Cameron Corner stands one of the most incongruous objects you’ll ever see: a cheery though weary yellow 1952 Leyland double-decker bus – or to be precise, the abandoned remnants thereof.

About 2,000 mechanically powered double deck buses have operated in Australia since 1905. The last one was withdrawn from service in May 1986 as new, more-reliable, articulated “bendy” buses were introduced.

Other abandoned double-decker buses are mouldering away - behind the Betoota Hotel between Windorah and Birdsville, and near the road from Karratha to Port Hedland. And I believe I saw another one in White Cliffs.

You have to admire the people who managed to drive the huge unwieldy creatures so far into the desert (they weighed about 12 tons, imagine digging that out a soft sand bog). Must be some cosmic connection with the Outback.

More pictures and further detail at the WebUrbanist post - Deserted Double Decker : Oz Outback’s busted bus

Murtoa's Big Buildings

When I told someone I wanted to go and see the Stick Shed, she said "but you've already seen it".
However you can't have too many photos of the Stick Shed.
The Marmalake shed was open on Saturday and Sunday as part of Murtoa's annual "Big Weekend", and while there were Heritage Vic people inside to answer questions and explain its workings, you were free to wander at your leisure.

Crowds walking the central corridor

Again there was a constant stream of people taking the opportunity to view the interior. I was followed in by a father and his young son who had been thrilled to be stopped at the level crossing  by a long goods train but was wanting to see the 'sticks'. Then coming out was stopped by an elderly couple who wanted their photo taken with the shed as a backdrop. They all wanted to experience that 'cathedral' sensation.

The skylights spotlighting the central corridor

Leaving the Stick Shed, I ventured across the road to the Wimmera Inland Freezing Works. The works were established in 1908 as a farmers' share co-operative. Building began in 1911.

The facade of the freezer works now the domain of pigeons

No. 14 Store door

 The aim of the venture was to freeze and transport fat lamb meat  to distant local or export markets. Unfortunately the scheme failed and the works closed in 1924. Since then the buildings have been abandoned, except for the section utilised by Schier Cabinet Makers as their furniture factory. Recently the Dunmunkle Sumpoilers  have taken over the engine shed and restored the engines. They also open the engine shed for The Big Weekend and have a number of engines operating.

 The works were powered by massive engines to generate electricity and drive the compressors. Amazingly the drive belts were made from 2" diameter rope.

Spare drive belts originally wrapped in canvas, now rotting on the landing

The huge single cylinder engines required between 6-8 of these belts to provide their drive power.
The masonry walls of the freezer buildings are 18" thick.

Doorway on the first floor level