{"id":5917,"date":"2016-06-27T15:53:32","date_gmt":"2016-06-27T14:53:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/?p=5917"},"modified":"2016-06-27T15:53:32","modified_gmt":"2016-06-27T14:53:32","slug":"a-timelapse-of-25-great-pulteney-street-london","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2016\/06\/a-timelapse-of-25-great-pulteney-street-london\/","title":{"rendered":"A Timelapse of 25 Great Pulteney Street, London"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/172422429\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"0\" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/172422429\">25 Great Pulteney Street &#8211; Timelapse<\/a> from <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/abowie\">Adam Bowie<\/a> on <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\">Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Do you ever embark on a project that somehow you never quite get around to completing? <\/p>\n<p>I certainly do. And here, finally, is a project that I&#8217;ve completed some six years after I started it.<\/p>\n<p>This begins back in 2010 when I was still working for Absolute Radio in One Golden Square, Soho, London. I sat at the back of the fourth floor, windows behind me looking across the Soho alleyway that is Bridle Lane and towards a building on Great Pulteney Street beyond. The fairly ugly building from the 1960s at 25 Great Pulteney Street had once been home to the agency Starcom Motive. But they&#8217;d long moved out, and the building had been empty for at least two years. When <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.co.uk\/maps\/@51.5124262,-0.136275,3a,75y,257.88h,88.18t\/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sItGObywyZ-ksOXA7IkiuhA!2e0!5s20081001T000000!7i13312!8i6656\">Google Street View&#8217;s team passed it in 2008<\/a>, the building was boarded up, and that was still the case by 2010.<\/p>\n<p>Now finally the developers were moving in, and it looked like something was happening with the building. I brought in an old Canon A470 digital camera, bought cheaply on eBay, and loaded a memory card with <a href=\"http:\/\/chdk.wikia.com\/wiki\/CHDK\">CHDK<\/a> &#8211; the alternative firmware that would provide my camera with timelapse facilties. I also bought an external power supply and suction camera mount. <\/p>\n<p>Over the next year and a half, between April 2010 and October 2011, I set the camera taking photos &#8211; first of the demolition of the building, and then of the new building rising in its place. I wasn&#8217;t consistent in either the location of the camera, the frequency of it taking photos, or what it was pointing at. When I went on holiday, I made sure to keep the number of photos a day low to ensure the memory card didn&#8217;t fill.<\/p>\n<p>In retrospect, there are a lot of things I&#8217;d have done differently, including changing the aspect ratio, the photo size and so on. I was left limited in what I could do with zooming or panning across scenes.  The camera was also limited in its angle of view from my window, and the camera was often mounted on a slight angle. The buildings were too close and the lens not wide enough to capture everything in one shot. The window meant reflections, and it wasn&#8217;t perfect either &#8211; neither clean nor unscratched.<\/p>\n<p>Over the course of having the camera in my window, I had to ensure that cleaners at Absolute didn&#8217;t unplug it. The suction of my suction mount would invariably fail over time, and I&#8217;d come into work to find the camera on the floor. On one occasion the fall was &#8220;fatal&#8221; and I bought an identical replacement on eBay to continue the project.<\/p>\n<p>In total I ended up with something like 250,000 photos. I wrangled them into something useable with Quicktime Pro, getting MP4 files from my JPGs. On underpowered PCs, this was a slow process. <\/p>\n<p>Finally I had a collection of 102 files, taking up about 10GB. And then I sat on the videos. I couldn&#8217;t say way exactly. I suspect that I found it a little daunting. I knew that there was too much video and it needed editing down, although it wasn&#8217;t really a big job. I had to find some music &#8211; two tracks. One for the demolition, and another for the new building. I&#8217;ve sped many of the clips up further, removed nights for the most part, when as already mentioned, reflections of my office were a problem. <\/p>\n<p>Finally it should be said that this is by no means every minute or day of the building being demolished and rebuilt. But it&#8217;s lots of it.<\/p>\n<p>And so it is, that some years after capturing this footage over many many months, I&#8217;ve pieced together this video! I hope you enjoy it.<\/p>\n<p><em>Notes and Further reading:<\/p>\n<p>The architects were WilkinsonEyre, and they have <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wilkinsoneyre.com\/projects\/25-great-pulteney-street\">a nice project page<\/a> with some lovely photos of the finished building.<\/p>\n<p>The building is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.e-architect.co.uk\/london\/great-pulteney-street-office-building\">reported<\/a> to have cost \u00a39.5m to complete, and was for the client  F&#038;C Property Asset Management (now <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bmorep.com\/home\/\">BMO Real Estate Partners<\/a>) <\/p>\n<p>The front of the building has some interactive railings in a piece called <a href=\"http:\/\/cinimodstudio.com\/project\/finial-response\/\">Finial Response designed by Cinimod Studio<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>25 Great Pulteney Street &#8211; Timelapse from Adam Bowie on Vimeo. Do you ever embark on a project that somehow you never quite get around to completing? I certainly do. And here, finally, is a project that I&#8217;ve completed some six years after I started it. This begins back in 2010 when I was still [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[692,691,51,690,363,557],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5917"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5917"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5919,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5917\/revisions\/5919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}