Post 498 - The Holidaze are Times for Trains!

 So here's a progress test of one project, a gif animation for testing, ultimately a 4K render...

Basic background

 

Introduction of Trains

About 85% there....making use of a different Keaton sketch

About 95% there now... switching to a different setting for a while

a change in eye direction, another train...

 

All images (c) 2022 Jim Middleton, The Animating Apothecary

Post 497 - Battle Creek in the 1980s - World Hot Air Balloon Championships - IN STEREO!

Various 3D photographs from 1981-1986 from The Event for the Surreal City at the time - where everyone first complained nonstop about all those bothersome crowds but then noticed afterwards they'd done a month's worth of business in three days.  They complained, nonetheless, and it was a shadow of its former self by the early 1990s.  But it was fun while it lasted, and your humble blogger had the good fortune to have press access, first as a grip for an early CNN reporter in the area (thanks, Joe!) and later, as a gaffer for a local videographer (thanks, Al!).  I took along an 8mm movie camera and a Stereo Realist, even then an outmoded bit of technology.  

(c) 2022 Jim Middleton, The Animating Apothecary

(use with permission only, please - I like to know where these things end up)

A video montage of the events is available on my Vimeo page - https://vimeo.com/775219731

Post 496 - 1979 - Battle Creek Michigan in STEREO 3D!

Taking off on an Air Wisconsin flight from the Battle Creek Regional Airport (back when it had commercial flights)

The Official Radioactive Black Squirrel from HELL - near my brother's first apartment

The secret entrance to Willard Library for after-hours reading

The pathway to pharmacy and cafeterias from HELL - no, just the way to get to the coffee machine at the now-not-even-a-parking-lot location of the Lakeview General Osteopathic Hospital

A little snow, surrounding my first car after college - it tried to kill me several times, but it got good mileage

The downtown unnamed alleyway from HELL - no, just a walk-by of the now-demolished "flat iron" building downtown.  It was packed with several floors of historic artifacts that all went down with the wrecking ball.

Now a great restaurant (Clara's On the River), but in 1979 it was still the Station On the Rails for Amtrak

A walking mall in a Michigan downtown, where winter arrives in October and leaves by May.  What could possibly go wrong with that business model.  This sculptural do-hickey was moved to the Leila Arboretum to the west when the mall returned to a road in the 1990s (the same consultant group recommended the creation of both events), but somewhere along the way, it lost its ball.  Ouch.

The "Capri" downtown was one of three adult theatres in 1979 Battle Creek.  This one was originally the "Rex" - it featured westerns back then - but went for other varieties of leatherstocking tales.

The Emily Andrus Home - for retired ladies seeking sanctuary and access to a convenient mailbox.

The flat-ion building again, because it had such great texture for 3D.

Fort Custer helped protect the Surreal City from invasion by Augusta.

Mr. DNA wants you to study SCIENCE!

My visiting brother from another pan-dimensional universe.

C. W. Post, looking toward the north in 1979.  Now he looks eastward, where a factory bearing his name still makes cereal products.