Saturday 22 July 2017

2017 Athens: "Paul In Athens", a TLTC project

The first week of May 2017 I joined a group in Athens, Greece to shoot some video and 360 images for part of a TLTC (Teaching and Learning for the Third Century) grant.  The UM gave out grants to some worthy faculty projects based on making transformative change in how they teach and how those projects can be of use to other faculty teaching different topics.

I have been working with Yaron Eliav on creating QTVR images of ancient objects in the Kelsey Museum of Archeology.  This trip was to shoot a video about the Apostle Paul's visit to Athens early in his work.  As part of this, I was to capture 360 images so that students could, through the web site, virtually visit some of the sites where we were shooting the video - sites visited by Paul during that trip.  None of those are shown here, as they are part of the project. these are my 'tourist' photos.

It was fun.  Our video team of Rob DeMilner, Paul Sutherland and myself worked very well together.  We were assisted before and during the shoot by our Israeli producer Rachelli, our Greek fixer Maria, and our Greek driver Tricia.  We also had a person doing makeup, and a couple of people with boats: one an ancient boat and one a modern boat.  We shot video of the ancient boat from the modern one.  We also had a drone operator that got us some very cool shots of the boat and other locations.  Again, sorry - no drone footage for the blog.  Still in process for the project.

The Final movie of "Paul in Athens" is here.

The "Making of" movie is here (very fun to watch!)

Here is our production crew at lunch, at a fabulous little cafe where Maria took us.

Paul, Rob, Tom, Racheli, and Maria!

The Hotel Stanley:


The view from one side of our hotel:


And the view from the other:


Ah, greek food:


Some amazing graffitti in Athens:





 Including this one that had to be viewed from the right spot:



And in the Old Market there was so much stuff!







Shooting at the Acropolis Museum:

View from the Acropolis Museum deck.

Getting ready for a shot.

Our contraption for shooting the entire frieze , rolling the camera along.

Shooting at the Acropolis

That's my shadow, at sunrise., all alone...


I KNEW they used LEGOs to build that stuff!

Boom, boom, boom, boom...

At the Areopagis

Yaron and the crew getting ready

Maria

Tom

Racheli

The View of Doom... Cool lighting early in the day.

A production shot from the market scene

Local actors did a fabulous job for us.

The Prop Shop where we gathered stuff for the Market scene

Outside looking in.

My fan club...


Inside view of how we supported the cart cover: ratchet straps!

The Temple of Zeus


I was really there.  I almost never have photos with me in them.

OTS of the drone pilot - drone is tiny, at the top.

Shooting at the highest point in Athens, Mount Lycabettus

Prepping the talent!

Partners in crime - Rob & Tom!

Shooting the Boat

The drone hot on the trail of the Ancient Boat

Maria!

Racheli!

The coastline of the small fishing cove that was our base camp

Acting!

Finally: how I managed to keep track of all the data.  

The setup in my hotel room where I emptied and backed up all the cards each night, charged batteries, and did some preliminary stitching of the 360 images.  Note the extensive use of US electrical outlets, so I only needed on adapter (almost visible in the wall on the left).

I may post more photos later!