Video of the week (3.26.10)

by Kent Wien on

The Video of the Week for this week shows the first flight of White Night Two while carrying the Virgin Galactic “Enterprise” spacecraft. The flight took place just three days ago and is the latest step toward operating commercial passenger space flights in 2011.

Gadling was there when they unveiled SpaceShipTwo under very stormy skies. But they couldn’t have had a more beautiful day to accomplish this test flight. I can’t imagine what it’s like to sit in the far right side of the giant aircraft. Landing just a few feet from the right side of the runway must take some getting used to. According to a comment on the video, the left side may be used to take observers of the launch in the future. This could be nearly as exciting as going on a launch itself.

As for the experience of travelling weightless over California for a few minutes, would you join the over 330 people who have put down deposits on the $200,000 flights? Virgin Galactic claims another 80,000 people are on the waiting list.

So, if money were no object, would you take a ride?

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Video of the week (3.20.10)

by Kent Wien on

This week’s video of the week, called Sandpit, is from Sam O’Hare who wanted to use a tilt-shift lens to turn a New York City scene into something that looks like a tiny model. But he discovered he could improve the look and feel by shooting the video with a normal lens and then blur the background and foreground after it was produced.

Tilt-shift videos of cites are nothing new, but Sam took it to a new level.

Sam explained the process of making Sandpit in an interesting interview by Aero Film if you need to know how it was created.

The effects are amazing. Coupled with the music from Human, you may find yourself hypnotized in no time.

Do you have a great travel related suggestion for our Video of the Week? Fill out this form or just include my twitter handle @veryjr in your tweet about it. Maybe we’ll use it as next week’s Video.

Video of the week (3.12.10)

by Kent Wien on

Last week we kicked off our new feature, the ‘Video of the Week’ with a wonderful scene taken from the nose gear of a 747 that was flying freight in Africa. This week, the pilot and videographer uploaded a “How-To” video that shows just how those exceptional scenes were captured, and just how they managed to lower the nose gear without dropping the main landing gear at the same time.

While that’s not this week’s video of the week, we just couldn’t get away from Balleka’s YouTube channel just yet. I wanted to share a video he did from the perspective of the Flight Engineer or “FE.” The FE is in charge of that rather large panel that sits behind the pilots on older aircraft like the 727 and, in this case the 747-200. In this rather amusing video, the “FE” laments that he’s working with “Clowns to the left of him and Jokers to the right.”

Full disclosure: I was an FE for over 4 years and I can certainly relate. It’s a thankless job that doesn’t even offer the chance to hand-fly a landing at the end of the day-which is the best part of the trip.

So here’s Balleka’s tribute to the FE, called the FE’s Lament 2010.

Do you have a great travel related suggestion for our Video of the Week? Fill out this form or just include my twitter handle @veryjr in your tweet about it. Maybe we’ll use it as next week’s Video.

Video of the week (3.05.10)

by Kent Wien on

Welcome to a new feature at Gadling. We’ve been doing the photo of the day, culled from many of the contributors to the Gadling group on Flickr, for years. But we’ve come across enough exceptional videos that we’ve now decided to share them with you each Friday.

The video chosen for our first Video of the Week is from Balleka, a 747 freighter pilot who had the crazy idea to stick an inexpensive Contour HD helmet camera on the nose gear of a 747-200. While the taxi-out and takeoff are entertaining to watch in HD, the approach and landing are simply spectacular. I honestly can’t stop watching this video, in fact.

As Balleka says, “The flight was from Johannesburg, South Africa to Maputo, Mozambique, and we were cleared for a visual approach onto RWY 05 as we were passing FL120 about 25nm out. Airline flying doesn’t get much better than this!”

I agree. But there’s absolutely no way I’ll be mounting my camera to the 767 nosegear anytime soon.

Do you have a video you’d like to suggest for our Video of the Week? Let me know via twitter or contact me through Gadling.

Gadling Video of the Week: Solidworking in Italy

by Justin Glow on

This week’s video comes from YouTube user utubenerd, who filmed a Veneziani twisting and tugging a flaming ball of red-hot glass into the shape of a delicate cat — all in under two minutes. The process is called solidworking, a method of sculpting where, according to this site, “glass is gathered from the furnace on the end of a solid metal rod called a puntil, or punty, and shaped into a sculpture,” in this case a cat. Quite extraordinary.


If you’d like to have your travel-related video featured on Gadling’s Video of the Week, please join our YouTube group and add a clip to the pool.