Scale models *

* (restored)

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A Canadian guy named Joe has been digging out the basement of his house using nothing but radio-controlled scale model construction equipment… since 1997. At an average rate of eight or nine cubic feet of earth moved each year, the process has been absolutely glacial. But what do you expect when every morning he drives his little excavator on its transport truck down to the basement, unloads it, and then uses it to dig out the basement walls. Then Joe uses the excavators to load R/C trucks and they work their way up a spiral ramp to the basement window where the soil gets dumped outside. Then, once it’s outside, he uses bulldozers to consolidate the pile of excavated dirt.

 

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Tom McKenzie tweeted an image after finding a model of the Taj Mahal made from toast at the end of his street near Queens Road Peckham station.

 

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The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety Research Center, a $40 million hangar of destruction in South Carolina, is where experts can destroy full scale scale model houses with rainstorms, hail, tornadoes and wildfire. The 21,000 square foot test chamber is as tall as a six-story building, and big enough to accommodate nine 2,300 square foot model homes at the same time.

 

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There are two things that are incredibly difficult to represent in scale — water and flight — but difficult doesn’t mean impossible. A Tamiya 1/350 King George by Chris Flodberg, is my pick as best build of the year. I have never seen the action of water captured as realistically as Chris has done on this model. You can practically hear the sound of the water rushing over the deck of the ship. You can see the ship being tossed from side to side over the waves. Just an amazing example of scale modeling.

 

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‘Peter Csákvári is a Hungarian food photographer, journalist, miniature artist, and cookbook author. He used to be a chef for 10 years but knew he always wanted to end up as a food photographer. Tiny Wasteland was born when he worked on a tiny island called Herm in the English Channel on a boring rainy day when he played with his macro lens.’

 

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Emilio Ruiz del Río was responsible for many of the special effect foreground miniatures for David Lynch’s film Dune. These pictures are from his personal collection, and were kindly supplied by his son-in-law.

 

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Phil Collins saved Mark Lemon’s scale model of the Alamo from being lost to history. Visitors to San Antonio can see the model at the History Shop on E. Houston Street. Narration by the rock star helps walk you through the story of the historic battle.

 

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A skilled German has hand-carved a life-sized replica of the classic 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL ‘Gullwing’, the sports car with the flip-up doors. The model is made not partly, but entirely of wood, and features all the intricate detail you might expect, including the wheels, tyres, M-B star, steering wheel, cockpit instruments, even the headlights – though these won’t light up unless you set fire to the creation.

 

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A 75-meter-long ice pool at Aker Arctic Technology Inc’s ice laboratory, in Helsinki, Finland. The company specializes in the design, testing, evaluation, simulation and development of icebreakers.

 

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Walt Disney proudly recapping where Disneyland was in 1966. Check out the working “It’s a Small World” scale model clock.

 

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For the film Speed 2: Cruise Control, a full-scale mock-up of the ship’s bow, known as the “rail ship” was placed a top a rail and propelled into the set constructed in Marigot.

 

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An investment forum in Sochi presented the scale model for the new ski resort “Logo-Naki.” All went well until the guests noticed the tiny figures having sex, crashed skiers, dead animals run over by cars, and several suicides.

 

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The Iowa State University’s Tornado/Microburst Simulator can generate a translating microburst-like jet (6.0 ft diameter) and a tornado-like vortex (4.0 ft diameter) for model testing, in order to understand the effects of tornados on buildings and other structures.

 

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If there ever was such a thing as a dream job, it would be a lifelong Marvel comic book fan getting to work on The Avengers live action film. Well, that’s me. I helped build the model set for the Thor/Loki confrontation on a rocky cliff dubbed The Promontory. The following are progress photos from start to finish. It also is an example of many big budget movie sets these days that are a small section of real surface that get extended digitally.I was one of a crew of sculptors sent to Albuquerque, NM to be part of set construction.

 

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After leaving this page and stepping back into the build environment, it shocks how much the building across from you, with its cheap-looking touches of faux masonry or abundant technical supplies, starts to evoke similarities with this so called “horrific, dystopian, retro past aesthetic” concert hall by Isaïe Bloch. What or who influenced this project? IB: Ship dismantling, collapse, Ferropolis, postmodernism, Juliaan Lampens, Filip Dujardin, Robert Gilson, Étienne-Louis Boullée, Gehard Demetz. Whose work is currently on your radar? IB: Abhominal, kokkugia, Preston Scott Cohen, former Studio Prix students.

 

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Martin Müller is a aeroplane modelling genius. He made this perfectly functional Airbus A310-200 at a 1:22 scale and flew it during an indoor airshow in Leipzing, Germany, three years ago.

 

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In the film Cleopatra (1963), when Cleopatra arrives in Rome, you can see the shadows of the movie set scaffolding on the black sphynx.

 

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Archaeological dig begins to unearth scale model of one of World War One’s bloodiest battlefields created by German prisoners of war.

 

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Isengard – Lord of the Rings

 

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A company specializing in creating custom props, mnfx, created these scale model works for Trex Decking & Railing as part of a marketing campaign. This scale model decks were constructed using actual Trex decking material that was milled down into 1:12 scale pieces and assembled into the models you see below.

 

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This is the world’s largest shake table earthquake simulator in Miki City, near Kobe, Japan. Measuring approximately 65 feet by 49 feet, the table can support 1:1 scale building experiments weighing up to 2.5 million pounds, like the million-pound seven-story condominium below, subjected to a simulated 6.7 magnitude earthquake.

 

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Film director Ron Howard has had the movie set created in order to film scenes for Angels and Demons, the prequel to The Da Vinci Code, after the Vatican banned filming in its grounds.

 

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Adam Savage Builds a Huge Scale Model of the Hedge Maze From Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

 

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Jim Casebere ‘Falling House with Fire’, 2012

 

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‘Dan Polydoris is a lifelong toy collector and writer. All the way back in 2010, he started a website called Death By Toys which he intended to be a place for him to write about his toy news and to showcase the occasional custom action figure he created. As time went by, his batches began to sell out faster and faster. Eventually, he began really focusing on making custom action figures and it paid off.’

 

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Alec Garrard, 78, has dedicated a massive 33,000 hours to constructing the ancient Herod’s Temple, which measures a whopping 20ft by 12ft. The pensioner has hand-baked and painted every clay brick and tile and even sculpted 4,000 tiny human figures to populate the courtyards. “I’ve always loved making models and as I was getting older I started to think about making one big project which would see me through to the end of my life,” he said. “I have an interest in buildings and religion so I thought maybe I could combine the two and I came up with the idea of doing the Temple. I’d seen one or two examples of it in Biblical exhibitions, but I thought they were rubbish and I knew I could do better.” He says his wife Kathleen thinks he is mad. “She wishes she’d married a normal person”.

 

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Where Eagles Dare set model, MGM British (Borehamwood) – Backlot (1968)

 

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The Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division’s newly renovated “Indoor Ocean”, called the Maneuvering and Seakeeping Basin (MASK) facility, helps the Navy to understand extreme maritime circumstances. MASK was built in 1962, and it’s still the Navy’s biggest wave pool: 360 feet long, 240 feet wide, and holds approximately 12 million gallons of water.

 

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Addams Family Dark Ride model kit

 

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Free Shipping 1/6 Scale Movie Action Figure Model Toys Head Sculpt Accessories For 12″ Action Figure Model

 

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Scott Weaver’s piece, made with over 100,000 toothpicks over the course of 35 years, is a depiction of San Francisco, with multiple ball runs that allow you to go on “tours” of different parts of the city.

 

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‘Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist uses just about every pre-CGI trick in the book to create a tale of a family being driven to madness by a very upset spirit. The film’s climax features the Cuesta Verde house—built on top of an Indian burial ground, in case you forgot—imploding and being sucked into another dimension. To pull it off, Hooper had a six-foot-long model replica of the house constructed. That process took four months, and then they destroyed it by attaching metal wires to various points inside and pulling it down through a funnel. The sequence was shot at 15 times normal speed to perfect the effect.’

 

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Dubailand

 

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Walthers Cornerstone Skyview Drive-In Model Kit: Actually Watch & Hear Your Favorite Movies on the Big Screen Any Time! Simply Slide Your Tablet into the Screen to Bring Your Drive-In to Life – Remove at Any Time. Works with Most 7″ Tablets including Apple(R) Ipad mini, Amazon(R) Kindle Fire, Samsung(R) Galaxy Tab 2.0 and Many More (sold separately). Compatible with Tablets up to 7-7/8 x 5-5/16″ (20 x 13.4 cm) and from 9/32 to 15/32″ (0.7cm to 12mm) Thick . Enjoy Full Sound Quality from Your Tablet Through Open Ports in Rear of Screen.

 

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Dry Ice and LEDs Make Drifting RC Cars Look Even More Realistic

 

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Wes Anderson is fond of using mind-numbingly detailed models in his movies that stand in for his larger set pieces. For The Grand Budapest Hotel, that meant a scale replica of the hotel with a working funicular.

 

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The largest small-scale model ever built, representing 41% of the US in miniature, was the Mississippi River Basin Model Waterways Experiment Station, located near Clinton, Mississippi. It was a large-scale hydraulic model of the entire Mississippi River basin, covering an area of 200 acres. The model was built from 1943 to 1966 and in operation from 1949 until 1973. In 1964, the site was opened to visitors for self-guided tours, and facilities included an assembly centre, 40 ft observation tower, operation observation room, and elevated platforms, drawing about 5000 visitors a year. The cost of maintaining the site as a tourist attraction was too high, so the model was abandoned and became overgrown.

 

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The Haunted Mansion

 

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Storefronts

 

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Long before the cast and crew of Zabriskie Point ever reached Carefree, a luxurious new housing development in the Arizona desert near Phoenix, the local citizens knew something out of the ordinary was happening in their parts. Over the weeks they had noticed a house being built several hundred yards off the main highway. As its form became more definite, they were astonished to see that it was an exact duplicate of the newest and most talked about dwelling in the Phoenix area, the $400,000 home of Carl Hovgard, tax research expert and founder of the Research Institute of America. However, they soon learned that only the exterior was being duplicated. The interior was just a skeleton. The mock-up was built in eight weeks by an MGM construction crew. A good deal of the material used in the original house was incorporated including a concrete slab roof, individually cast concrete blocks and stone for the entire front of the house. It cost more than $100,000. But its life was short. Filled with dynamite and gallons of gas and benzine, the house was guarded carefully and the exact time of the explosion was revealed to no one. Still, many local people lined the highway in front of the house in the late afternoon of demolition day. In ten seconds two-and-a-half-months’ worth of work vanished although it took hours for the fire to completely die out. There were, miraculously, no injuries and all 17 cameras operated perfectly. Michelangelo Antonioni would have two hours of footage from which to choose a few seconds for his crucial scene.

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! One of the strange and interesting things about editing a film is that we might have a take of a scene that’s by far the best one, where the performances are the most exciting, but it doesn’t fit into the flow of the film because it would stand out too much, so we have to use a less good one that works better. Really strange to have to make that choice. Wow, things even you can’t stomach, ha ha. You and love picked maybe the second best quote, I say. Love making Macron’s next interviewer ask him about his comb over, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, I was trying to figure out who in the world would hire cash_couple, but you’re right, a a Pre-Raphaelite painter, of course! Let me know how the Don Paterson book is. ** David Ehrenstein, I think Hockney is living here in France. He’s in the media here all the time. He’s busy painting awful landscape paintings of the French countryside and earning tons of money. That actor is either very dead or he pulled off one hell of a vanishing act. ** A, I like ‘Perfect Blue’. I’ve never watched ‘Deathnote’ strangely. My favorite anime I’ve seen in recent years is ‘Your Name’. I always highly recommend ‘Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space’. It’s insane. Nope, I haven’t seen Brent Corrigan act. Well, “act”. I did a blog post about David Decoteau. Me, I’ll always prefer films that could end up in the Criterion Collection when/if Criterion is in a daring mood. My weekend was okay, not eventful. I haven’t seen Zac yet. Quite possibly today. Oh, yeah, cool about the King Kong thing. My guess is we’ll start editing at the weekend at the earliest. Anyway, it’s not like we’ll be in prison when we start. Just seeing the acronym JT still makes my blood sort of boil. ** Jack Skelley, Skedaddley! Nice review! My ‘son’ knows his shit. Everyone, the great Jack Skelley’s legendary novelistic masterpiece ‘Fear of Kathy Acker’, very soon to be (re)published by Semiotext(e), got a excellent review that I recommend you read as an appetite whetter. Here. ** Misanthrope, I think I told you I had a root canal last year which involved three visits, tons of x-rays, two operations, etc., and the whole thing cost $30. Well, maybe 2/3 of them are brothers. I mean, it’s not impossible. ** Bill, I do have a bad habit of only including the bad escort reviews. But that’s mostly because the good ones are so boring. Didn’t know that Lane book came back. I never read that one. Off to the races I go. ** Darbs, Hi, Darbs! And now it’s Tuesday! How weird! I spilled very hot coffee on my hand the last time I was in Tokyo, and my hand swole up and looked like Mickey Mouse’s hand the whole time I was there. I may have mentioned that my grandmother was a taxidermist. She was always giving my family taxidermy animals, and our house was full of stuffed wolves and gila monsters and birds and lions and stuff. Cool revelation about your book maybe needing to be a comic book! How’s it going? No, I never read comics, or not since I was a kid. I made a graphic novel some years back with the artist Keith Mayerson. It’s called ‘Horror Hospital Unplugged’, and I’m actually really proud of it. Talk to you as soon as you see fit. xo. ** Steve Erickson, I don’t know if I’m in the mood to reassess Merchant-Ivory at the moment. But it’s an interesting idea. Yes, I saw that about the Udo Kier shebang at AFA! Fun! And you wrote about it! Everyone, The great Anthology Film Archives is doing a Udo Kier retrospective, which is obviously very enviable re: you NYC ensconced folks, and, anyway, Mr. Erickson wrote about it, so go find out what the scoop is here. Interesting about Rough Trade. LA’s great Amoeba had to move as well, but it seems just as great and pretty much the same in its new digs. ** Cody Goodnight, Hi. I’m A-okay. I’m pretty sure I’ll go see ‘Superstar’, yes. I’m a massive Disneyland obsessive, but fellow Disney obsessive friends warded me off seeing ‘Escape from Tomorrow’ for the reasons you state. So I skipped it. Being obsessive, that was hard though. Theme parks are possibly my biggest obsession. Well, them and home haunts. I’ll travel all over the world just to visit them. If I had to choose, I’d say Efteling in Holland is my favorite amusement park. It’s so great. It was a big influence on Disney -> Disneyland. You should go someday if you ever get the chance. Have a day of days! ** Kettering, Hi. Well, Zac and I are kind of like overgrown kids, so it is a little like what you imagine. Wait, you’re currently driving somewhere for two days? I hope it’s worth it, or I hope you like road trips. I sure do. ** Right. One of the ‘things’ that I have a thing for is scale models, so I decided to restore this old, old post about them. Simple enough. See you tomorrow.