Below is a short film made by Hootan Washian a student at the University of Technology in Delft. Created using Google Earth and SketchUp it explores living and working in Rotterdam:
The first part of the movie provides an interesting example of how Google Earth can be used to add a locational context and subsequently augmented with information via additional software such as After Effects.
The Balloon Project is charming in its simplicity – Luca and Ira send a video camera up into the sky hanging from helium balloons chasing it from below on bikes – and the results are fantastic.
The project has covered various cities around the world, below is the capture of Amsterdam from July 2008:
Carrying on the theme is Berlin, in their own words:
It was a rainy afternoon in Berlin and our last chance to do The Berlin Balloon Project since Luca (one of the co-founders of The Balloon Project) was leaving the next day. We strapped more than 30 helium balloons to a video camera and sent it up all by itself over the city some few hundred meters. We then proceeded to chase it down with bikes as the rain slowly brought it back to earth. Watch “The Chase” to see how it looked from the ground:
You can view the balloons route mapped out: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1710353
It is well worth taking a look at http://theballoonproject.org/
Google Earth is a natural yet still underused place for urban planners to communicate the future of cities. With the addition of the timeline feature it is possible to chart development according to phases of growth. This is exactly what a company in the Netherlands has done to illustrate the proposed changes to the station are in Utrecht.
We have captured and embedded below a short movie illustrating the use of the timeline feature:
The complete file comes in at 25Mb, note it requires a reasonably powerful machine to ensure a constant frame rate.
Take a look at http://www.3idee.nl/google/index_en.htm for full details and the kmz file.
The demo reel above is from ‘Pixeldreams: Architectural Visualization Services’.
Pixeldreams, is a company based in Barcelona, Spain with representatives in London, Dubai and Abu Dhabi that has, since 1998, specialized in the creation of virtual renderings and animations for all types of architectural projects.
The soundtrack has been disabled by YouTube due to breach of copyright, it is always wise to check your copyright on demo reels before uploading to video sharing sites – MP3 Unsigned is well worth a look in this respect.
See http://pixeldreams.info/ for more information.