It’s not the first timelapse video of Venice, and it certainly won’t be the last. You can bank on that. But what distinguishes this clip from the others is its continual focus on the canals that make Venice, Venice. Gives this video three minutes and it will give you a full day in the life of Venetian waterways. And when you’re done, don’t miss How Venice Works, an impressive 18 minute video that explains the complex inner-workings of the city made up of 124 islands, 183 canals, 438 bridges and the rest. How it all hangs together is pretty amazing.
Google Street View launched in 2007, giving web users the ability to tour neighborhoods with a series of 360° panoramic maps. The technology seemed pretty straightforward … until people realized that it wasn’t. Since ‘07, techies have figured out some cool and unexpected uses for the software, and Google began using it to offer virtual tours of famous historical sites (Pompeii, Stonehenge and Versailles) and then international museums, ranging from the MoMA and Met in New York City, to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. (More on that here.) And now they’re pushing the limits of the technology just a bit further.
The video above explains how the project got started and how the images were gathered, while also offering a quick demo of the online experience. You can start your voyage to the Amazon here, or head to Google’s blog to learn more about this project created in partnership with the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS).
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ABC’s period drama Pan Am may have come to an end two weeks ago, but if you look hard enough, you can still find a few Pan American World Airways-inspired media. Back in the sixties and seventies, at the height of the long heyday that would cement its place in the lore of Cold War American culture, the airline commissioned New Horizons, a series of ten- to fifteen-minute documentaries on their various exotic destinations. Eleven of these short subjects have surfaced on YouTube, so you, too, can feel the midcentury aspirational thrill of motoring across the rolling Irish countryside in a powder-blue Austin-Healey, handling creatures snatched fresh from the sea floor by a Fijan diver, or gazing upon Sydney’s imposing new modernist apartment complexes.
Maybe I’ve made these sound like glorified commercials pitched toward newly affluent Americans in need of a charming corner of the Earth to loaf their two weeks away. But in that era of stoically authoritative voiceovers, ethnomusicologically-spiced orchestral scores, and colors vividly saturated enough to approach fantasy, weren’t commercials sometimes glorious? And as even this small archive reveals, the New Horizons films had audiences well outside the United States, the Anglosphere, and even the West. The production company Pan Am engaged to make these, a certain Movietonews, Inc., assembled the footage and audio in such a separate way as to allow for both easy narration and easy translation into other languages.
Forty or fifty years on, this gives us the opportunity to enjoy such simultaneously cross-temporal and cross-cultural experiences as New York in Italian, Hawaii in Portuguese, America’s national parks in Japanese, and the Philippines in German. If you happen to get as excited about midcentury advertising, documentary film, language-learning, and multi-national media as I do, these New Horizons will make for rich Friday viewing indeed.
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