Thursday, February 15, 2007

Jack and Alfie Dig a Big Hole

Since October of last year the City of Vancouver engineers have been tunnelling a new sewer main from Sunset Beach in the West End to Vanier Park on the eastern edge of Kitsilano.

The new pipe (roughly one meter in diamter) will cross under False Creak and supplements one built just before WWII in 1939. You can find all the nifty details in the June 2006 False Creek Crossing Fact Sheet

What does all this have to do with Jack and Alfie? Good question and I'm glad you asked.


My nephews and niece have been fans of Thomas the Train Engine and His Friends for a good number of years now. However, there is no greater a fan of Thomas and His Friends than the budding YouTube director and nephew extrodinaire known simply as camtaz2.

Back in January the Greater Vancouver Regional District began digging the western edge of the sewer extension and I recorded the initial dig as a timelapse over the course of 8 hours. It was a great day for video with constant sunshine, crawling shadows from the leaf bare trees in Vanier Park and then the perfectly timed arrival of bay fog as the winter sun set.

Two of Thomas's friends are Jack and Alfie - a pair of diggers who love moving mounds of dirt from one spot to another and, from the unique perspective of timelapse, signed on to help with Vancouver's sewage system upgrade.

Here then is my latest video. Jack and Alfie Dig a Big Hole.

You can access the high resolution Stage6 (DivX) link by clicking here -> Jack and Alfie Dig a Big Hole. I'd recommend downloading the video and then playing it for smoother performance. You may also need to install the DivX viewer which is a pretty painless and computer safe process and one that will open up tons of nifty video viewing posibilities.

The You Tube link can be found here -> Jack and Alfie Dig A Big Hole. It's a lower resolution version of the same video.

The simplese route though is to click twice on the image below to view this latest video.

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