Title: TianAnMen Square
Location: Eastern side of TianAnMen Square, Beijing, PRC
Movie Window Size: 320x240
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One might ask why this scene is a celebration of Mother Earth, when there is nary a natural object in sight. What you can see, apart from the imposing buildings and endless tiles of concrete, are thousands of Beijing residents trying to find some place in their overcrowded city where they can attempt to connect with nature. The vehicle of choice in this case is the kite. All around the square on almost any day, one can see scores of kites being flown. In my movie, in addition to many different kinds of kites, one can see an extremely long "dragon" kite being flown directly in front of the Great Hall of the People (the Hall itself isn't really that great).
Other notable elements in the movie are the actual Tiananmen Gate, which leads to the Forbidden City, a column memorializing the Chinese heroes of the revolution, a column which became the center of the student protests in 1989, and Mao's tomb, which is also located in the center of the square.
This movie was shot using a Quicktake 200 and assembled with the Apple Quicktime VR Authoring Studio. I used Apple's Make Panorama application to make the final movie out of the resulting PICT file (to ensure VR 1.0 compatibility). I don't have a panhead on my tripod, but have improvised using rubberbands so that my camera lens is located directly above the center of rotation. To ensure accurate rotation I use a template made with Illustrator with a dried out felt tip pen as a pointer, once again attached to my tripod with rubber bands. This contraption attracted quite a crowd while I took the sixteen pictures which make up the movie, but people were nice enough to rotate around the tripod with me so that they were not in the picture.
This movie was shot at 3:00 pm local time on 3/21/98, corresponding to 9:00 pm 3/20/98 HST.