Single Aspect's Blog

Owing to a change of hosting and protection against hacking which is prevalent at the moment I’m running this parallel blog under a different URL ending in .co.uk instead of .org.uk.

If you follow this blog then please bookmark both http://www.singleaspect.org.uk and http://www.singleaspect.co.uk

Thank you.

After several iterations back and forth between the still running Orchard Hosting and the http://www.1freehosting.com/ space I’ve just about settled on leaving it here, and have managed to keep the radio broadcasts and films onboard for the time being which is good news for all of us.

I’m up to my ears in I.T. study at the moment for work so you’re not going to hear a lot from me for some time since that takes priority but I’m still active on Twitter and still have my ear to the ground with regard to housing matters.

It’s Friday so something a bit more light hearted, a quick look at what have constituted the most popular downloads of late.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you visit this site often you may well be experiencing failed links.  This is because I have recently stripped out all the tracking links that have in the past enabled me to create visitor statistics.  By implication this means that old bookmarked links will no longer work.

So the thing to do is just to start at the home page and use the search box or the links across the top and down the right hand side to find the page you want, then bookmark that again, and delete the old bookmark.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

This is the spare blog for Single Aspect. I’m just playing around with themes and stuff, the real blog is next door at http://singleaspect.org.uk/

Post Modernism – the gratuitous use of stuck on detailing such as plastic pediments, columns, pilasters and coloured window frames leading to a cheap and tacky appearance that quickly dates.

The most popular pages to date are as follows:-

Click image for full version

1. Home page
2. Parker Morris (pm/index.php)
3. High Rise Dreams (documentary) (2760)
4. Crap flats (884)
5. Density (1897)
6. Woods House Pimlico (A2Dominion) (2103)
7. Housing Typologies (9)
8. Author (19)
9. Single aspect flats (8)
10. Developers (114)

This presents a problem when integrating old material with new, how to blend the two image sizes? There are three possible solutions:

1. Add black bars at left and right of the archive footage. This would be my preferred solution, but it doesn’t work as people viewing on a normal tv assume there is a fault and try to resize the image each time we cut from archive to contemporary shots. (and I’ve actually done tests myself where I’ve seen viewers doing this, so it is a real problem).

2. Zoom into the archive footage donut fills the widescreen frame. This is commonly done, but has two big negative consequences- the image degrades as it is enlarged so it gets soft and fuzzy, and you lose the original framing by chopping off the top an bottom of the frame. I don’t think it’s my job to reframe the work of great directors like Eisenstein, Humphrey Jennings or Halas & Batchelor.

Which leads to the imperfect compromise that I’ve chosen (along with quite a few other modern filmmakers facing this problem. We used the archive footage full frame ( that is entirely uncropped) and then to fill the gaps at the side used a defocused, desaturated and darkened blow up of the same shot.

Tom Cordell