My pre-riot gigapixel photo of the Game 7 Crowd of the 2011 Stanley Cup was cited in the book Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy by Thomas P. Keenan.
Excerpt (page 31):
While the surveillance camera and cell phone videos used by the VPD were certainly helpful, they are nowhere near the state-of-the-art in surveillance camera technology. A remarkable photo of the crowd on Georgia Street taken a few hours before the riot was posted by a company called Active Computer Services. It is actually a composite image of 216 high-resolution photos stitched together, and it reveals an uncanny level of detail. You can zoom in from the massive scene to identify individual faces with ease. Active Computer Services has a particularly telling motto on their home page (“I spy with my little eye…. “) and they tout the “forensic science” applications of their technology.
“Technology is rapidly moving into our bodies,” writes cyber expert Keenan, “and this book gives a chilling look ahead into where that road may lead us – on a one way trip to the total surrender of privacy and the commoditization of intimacy.” Here is the definitive dissection of privacy-eroding and life-invading technologies, coming at you from governments, corporations, and the person next door.
“This masterful weaving of the negatives and positives of technology makes for a book that is realistic about technology’s perils yet optimistic about it’s great potential.”—Foreword Reviews
One of the biggest summer blockbuster movies of 2012 was Marvel’s The Avengers, produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
Although roughly a third of “The Avengers” is set in New York City precious little was actually filmed there. Industrial, Light and Magic (ILM) crew members, headed by visual effects supervisor Jeff White, photographed 7-miles of city streets (about ten city blocks by about four blocks) from a variety of heights and at different times of day totaling 250,000 images. The crew then digitally recreated roughly 20 square blocks of mid-town Manhattan using a variety of techniques. Live action shoots were held primarily on sound stages in New Mexico and in the streets of Cleveland.
The Clauss RODEON VR panohead was used to capture and create 1800 x 360 degree pano-spheres. The images above (captured from the video below at 1:10 mark) shows the Clauss RODEON VR and a laptop running RODEONpreview.
To rebuild the streets, ILM sent a team into New York to photograph the city. “It was the ultimate culmination of building on the virtual background technology (at ILM),” says White. “We started with the biggest photography shoot I know we have done here, which was 8 weeks with four photographers out in the streets of New York.” The team shot some 1800 x 360 degree Pano-spheres of NY, using the Canon 1D with a 50mm lens – tiled, and as an HDR bracketed set.
The ILM team worked their way down the streets at street level – shooting every 100 feet down the road, and then started again doing the same street via a man lift at a height of 120 ft, then they would move to shoot every building roof top. But given how long it takes to do a bracketed tiled set of images, especially in sometimes high wind, it was not as simple as just moving down a street. By the time the team would get to the end of the street it would have taken so long that the sun would have completely shifted, thus making one end of the street lit from morning sun, but the end of the same street lit from the opposite side by afternoon light. To allow for this the team had to zig zag across New York, and try to capture most of the streets from the roughly same time of day, but on different days. Even this was greatly complicated by changing weather. Once all the images were captured, tiled and combined, another team set to removing (painting out) all the ground level people, cars and objects. Then a third team would re-populate the streets with digital assets ready to be seen in perspective or perhaps blown up. ILM came up with complex algorithmic traffic scripts to populate streets and create the sort of traffic grid lock any real world incident like this would naturally cause.
My pre-riot gigapixel photo of the Game 7 Crowd of the 2011 Stanley Cup continues to garner so much attention by various individuals, companies and institutions.
Most recently, it was used in a study by The Socionomics Institute which showed that through people’s facial expressions, the social mood of the crowd was predominantly negative.
They theorized that the economy, particularly the S&P/TSX Composite Index (which was at a 9% decline at that time) was an indicator of the negative social mood and “may have played a role in the riot.”
The study does not suggest that 2011 Stanley Cup riot was a result of the decline in the stock markets but rather it points out that regardless of the outcome of the game, the general social mood of the crowd was already negative.
Below is a excerpt of the study “Social Mood Can Be Evident in Facial Expressions” by Alan Hall (The Socionomist December 2013).
Social mood is an unconsciously shared motivational impulse arising from social interaction independently from events. People express social mood in many ways. Stock markets provide the most rapid and best-documented reflection of the fluctuations in social mood. We are not really sure how social mood is communicated. It is communicated by what people say, surely, but there are probably many things … that are more unconscious: The way that facial muscles change, for example. We might be hearing content on television, but we are also getting messages [from] facial expressions.
Social mood is unconscious, but it influences conscious emotions, which are visible in facial expressions … “The face is one of the richest sources of communicating affective and cognitive information,”1 which simply means that we can tell a lot about what others are feeling and thinking by their facial expressions.
People who pose for group photos are conscious of what they are doing, yet the influence of social mood is still anecdotally evident.
Photos of unaware subjects in crowds are different, yet they also seem to reflect social mood.
For example, this cropped photo shows a tiny portion of Ronnie Miranda’s GigaPixel image of many of the 100,000 hockey fans that crowded into the streets of Vancouver, Canada in June 2011.
Notice the generally unhappy facial expressions, which reflect less-than-positive emotions. Since no one is smiling, the faces suggest that the crowd’s social mood was predominantly negative. And although this photo doesn’t tell us about the immediate direction of the mood trend, what happened next does…. the Vancouver Stanley Cup Riot erupted.
We think that social mood played a role in the riot, because it erupted after a 9% decline within a larger 22% bear market in the Toronto S&P/TSX Composite Index (see Figure 4).
In similar fashion 17 years earlier, the 1994 Vancouver Stanley Cup Riot also occurred after Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals. The June 14 riot followed a 12% drop in the S&P/TSX Composite Index (see Figure 5).
We think the stock market declines and the sour faces in the hockey crowd reflect the same thing: a negatively trending social mood.
