Author: flipper01

World’s Biggest Pheasant

We needed to make up some millage so we spend a whole day speeding through South Dakota, stopping for a breather at a town called Huron – which proudly boasts as being the home to the world’s largest pheasant. As far as we know there’s no real story behind why it’s there other than shooting pheasants to death seems to be very popular in that area. There is however a legend:

Once there was a giant ring-neck pheasant whom all the hunters wanted to claim as a trophy. One day a young boy happened upon the Giant Pheasant and, because of its magnificent beauty, spared the bird’s life. In exchange, the pheasant promised to remain always at that spot, until every person in the world has seen the World’s Largest Pheasant and his [smaller] offspring.

We’ve been pulled over by the cops twice today, once for some odd rule us foreigners didn’t know about, and once because we were speeding, although we were not, it’s more likely because we had out of town plates. This really is middle America folks.

The Biggest Ball of Twine (kinda)

OK, we had to see it, it’s the Biggest Ball of Twine, well not really, the biggest one is somewhere else and is a tiny bit bigger, but that one was rolled by any passing joe, the ball we visited (in Darwin, Minnesota) was all rolled by one person, a guy called Francis Johnson, so it’s really the only one that counts. Unfortunately Francis is long dead, and there was no-one there to give us the tour so our visit was a bit fleeting, seeing as we were about 300 miles behind schedule. I’m pretty sure we covered all angles, I mean it’s just a large ball in a gazebo, what else is there to say?

(of course this is twine we’re talking about here, and not string, that a whole other deal, obviousley).

Meeting Dr. Evermore

Today we visited Dr. Evermore and Lady Eleanor and had a tour of the Doctor’s massive machine; The Forevertron, which (once complete) will blast him into space in a glass egg within a copper frame to live forever on a beam of light. There are many other machines and characters to help him on his way such as the Gravitron which will remove all the water and excess weight from his body, as well as a viewing platform for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to view the launch and a huge band of birds to play a tune during the fantastical celebrations on the day.

Dr. Evermore is actually Tom Every, Lady Eleanor is his ex-wife (Eleanor), and the Forevertron is part of Tom’s huge sculpture garden full of steam-punk scrap metal sculptures all involved in the fantasy story Tom has created around Dr.Evermore’s journey into space. He’s been building it for 25 years and it really is pretty damn huge and pretty amazing to wander around. Tom and Eleanor spoke to us for 4 hours, bought us drinks, gave us a door knob, a signed book, dvd and two letters we’re waiting for an appropriate time to open. It was hard to leave the place but we had 5 hours to drive today as we are running a little behind today.

During this five hour drive we came up with a new idea for a title for this thing, what do you guys think of ‘The World’s Greatest Documentary (What We’ve Made)’? Answers in the comments below please.

Painting into History

Today we met Mike Carmichael and his wife Glenda at their home in Alexandria, Indiana. Mike has been painting a baseball for the last 30 years, it is now the biggest ball of paint in the world with 21,201 coats of paint, and we got to paint coat number 21,201! Each coat is a different colour from the last, we choose yellow, mike handed us the rollers and the rest is now history. We signed the ledger detailing when we painted the coat, and what colour, while Glenda prepared our official certificates. Then, to our surprise, Mike offered to take us all out for lunch, which we gleefully accepted. Mike and Glenda led us to a nice little local dinner and we had a slap up feed. Mike and Glenda were great, really friendly and generous – we left Mike to return to the ball and add another a few coats, that man knows a thing or two about dedication.

Appetite for Distraction

Howdy folks, right now I’m sitting in a motel room somewhere in between West Virginia. We’ve begun our 3 week road trip across America to is talk to some of the people that build the roadside attractions that are dotted along the highways and freeways of this country. We filming and photographing the whole thing, and when I say ‘we’ I mean me, Jason, Richard Johnson and the Boob.

We’re at day 3 right now, we landed in New York 3 days ago, we stayed the night, picked up the hire car and got the hell out of there.

We drove 130 miles down to Margate, New Jersey to visit Lucy the Elephant (America’s oldest roadside attraction). We spoke to Richard who runs the show down there and a very nice and knowledgeable chap was he. Then Sarah (also knowledgeable, also nice) took us on a tour of Lucy’s innards, which are surprisingly spacious for an Elephant. The chats went really well and we took some pretty video.We then drove another 220 miles to Haggerstown (which is a lot like an American version of Strood) and checked into a hotel for the night. Johnson got a bit frisky with the Boob during the night, Boob is still trying to catch up on the lost sleep.

Today we drove another 200 miles see Mark Cline in Virginia and have him show us around some of his attractions; Foam Henge, Dinosaur Kingdom and Professor Kline’s Monster Museum. He’s a really nice guy (yeah, another nice person, a theme may be developing) and also pretty amazing. He’s made so much stuff over the years it’s tricky to work out where he gets the time, even if he does do it full time. He just wants to entertain people and make them happy, not a bad way to make a living. Foam Henge is a life size replica of the stone original, Dinosaur Kingdom is a sprawling adventure through the woods where giant dinosaurs attack fighters from the civil war, and the Monster Museum is a full on walk through haunted house kinda deal that’s probably one of the best I’ve been in. Mark has invited us to visit his work shop tomorrow morning, and then we’re off to see how far we can drive towards Ohio for our next stop.

Waiting for Gorgo, set build and shoot

The shoot for the film we were working on at Elstree Studios finished last weekend (we did the graphic design and helped with the set build), and we’ve just got all photos together of the final set build and shooting for you all to see. It all turned out looking quite splendid.

Enjoy

 

We Will Survive

Survival Kit

This morning we had a knock on the door (well, ring of the door bell, but you know what I mean) and Mr Postman handed us 2 jiffy bags with “Survival Kit” written on each (plus address and stamps and what have you). Inside we found these essential English food stuffs to keep us alive during our imminent American Adventure (if you don’t already know about it stay tuned, we’ll be blogging all about it very soon) along with some life saving foreign translations. All lovingly crafted by our pals Oli and Meg, cheers kids, we shall surely live to fight another day with these kits tucked into our trunk.

28 Days (in one day)

Well we’ve been threatening it for a while and this Saturday we finally did it, we made a video for our mates Cassette Electrik for their track ’28 Days’.

OK, when I say ‘we’ I actually mean me n jas trotted about telling people what to do while some jolly nice people did most of the hard work. One of which people was Peter Allibone who shot and lit the whole thing amazingly, no really, he did a bang up job and added loads of ideas that we can take the credit for later. We also had the unlimited help of make-up artist and stylist Wendy Oliver, who was supposed to leave a good few hours before she finally did (cheers for that Wendy – by the way, how do you remove that pink make-up?). Of course mum made too much food, but that’s what mum does, and dad let us invade his garage again. And the band jumped about, stood still, took half a pace to the left, no a bit more, back a bit, now a bit more to the left…etc.. without hitting us too many times.

We now have the simple task of editing nearly 5 hours of footage into a 4 and a half minute clip. How hard can it be? See you in a few months.

As usual, too many photos of the shoot can be found here