Behind the Movies: Foundation Cam Uncovered

When work finally resumed on the foundation, we'd had many long days of sitting around being geeks to prepare for it, so it was inevitable that we would hit upon the idea of trying to film various events in the course of things.

The technology was fairly simple: a pair of net-enabled digital cameras that are designed to make stop-motion films, plus some software that takes the photos and enfilmates them. These things are used for video conferencing, when people feel the need to do that, and they can take real video, but you try storing that much real-time video, much less watching it. They can also be mounted just about anywhere under your house, should you so desire.

The real work is setting one up in a new location. There's lots of death-defying feats.

And wire slinging under the house, usually with the guys hard at work around us (unless we have time to do it at night before it gets too dark).

The idea is to make the cameras as out of the way of the work as possible, but to give them a nice long view of something important that we expect to happen. So if you look carefully around the site, you might catch a glimpse of a little mechanical eye watching you from the dark.

Or we might just have hung the thing on the fence, subtlety be damned.

posted by ayse on 08/31/05