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by Stuart Langridge.
Original Post: Potton in 2012, a video drivearound
Feed Title: as days pass by
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kryogenix
Feed Description: scratched tallies on the prison wall
About six months ago I saw a YouTube video of Bedford, the nearest big
town to where I grew up, in the mid-eighties. (It probably wasn't
this one but that's
fairly close.) It was fascinating; we used to go shopping in Bedford back then
when I was a kid, and seeing all the shops that are no longer there was
most interesting. Anyway, I mentioned this to my dad, and he said: we should
do something like that for Potton, the town in which I grew up (and in which
my parents still live). Today we did exactly that; since Potton is a small town,
we drove down every street in town and recorded it on video.
You learn a new respect for the Google Street Car people doing this, I can
tell you.
I wanted to add maps and details of which street was which in the video, and
after some playing around with the OpenShot video editor* I worked out how to
do just that. Each street gets a couple of seconds of "title" showing its name
and also where it is on a map of Potton. The maps were made possible by
OpenStreetMap, which is like Google
Maps crossed with Wikipedia; it's a map of the whole world, but it's created by
people and not by corporations who want money to licence it, and therefore
you're allowed to use the maps to do interesting things.
Warning: technical stuff about vector graphics formats coming up. Skip this
paragraph if you don't care.
What I did was get a map of Potton from OSM, export it as SVG,
and then go through that map in Inkscape and mark each road with the name of
that road. I was enormously pleased to see that each road on an OSM SVG is an
individual path (making this possible). OSM people: if you wanted to do
something really cool, then in an SVG export make each path have the name of
the road that it is as its ID (rather than "path2319" or whatever). This is
probably quite hard (each road has at least the path defining the street itself,
a path defining the border of that street, and the text), but naming these as
"roadHighStreet_main", "roadHighStreet_background", and "roadHighStreet_text"
or something might be possible. Anyway, once I had an SVG with all the IDs set
to be the street names, a quick Python script
was enough to turn that into one SVG per road with that road highlighted in red.
(You can get the SVG of
Potton with all roads marked with IDs as well, if it's useful to you.) The
script also creates an "overlay SVG" for each road name as well, so that I could
overlay the road name onto the video so you can see at any point where you are
in town.
End of technical stuff.
This was a fun little project. I mean, what you've got is a video which is
nearly two hours long and is nothing but driving round a small Bedfordshire
town, so it ain't gonna win any Oscars, but I'm pleased we did it. Maybe in
twenty years someone will find this on YouTube and be amazed at what Potton
looked like in 2012.
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