Presidential television

The History channel is running various president-related programs in the next 24 hours, including:

• The White House: Behind Closed Doors
• The Presidents (a series)
• Modern Marvels: presidential transportation
• Secret Access: Air Force 1
• Civil War Journal
• A Presidency Revealed (a series including JFK and FDR)
• UFO Files (Cleveland was abducted by aliens)
• Star Wars Tech (presumably about Reagan)
• Batman Unmasked (Harding fought crime in a black cloak and cowl and became the inspiration for Batman; the "playboy president" persona was a ruse).

UPDATE: At 8 AM and 2 PM on Thu, they're also rerunning their excellent doco on Fort Knox. The history and architecture of the bullion depository is really fascinating.

The White House in 3D - a mini-tour

I've finally managed to produce a high-quality version of the animation of Pete Sharkey's 3D President's Park with narration by me. If you go to YouTube, you should see a little "watch in high quality" link in the lower right for best quality.



The next step is naturally to go inside the White House, and with Pete hard at work on various rooms (have you seen Wingnut's Workings lately?) the only trick will be making the transitions seamless. And then, if I can get Pete to create them: historical versions of the White House in 3D. Imagine flying over Lincoln's or Jefferson's White House....

White House Week on C-SPAN

Today is the beginning of White House Week, C-SPAN's answer to Shark Week.

They even have a floor plan. The "Chocolate Shop" is placed in the basement. I recall seeing a reference to this before; is it really different from the Pastry Kitchen on the first mez?

And there's video of the Living Room! So much for my separate-bedrooms theory....

UPDATE: Hey! They used my version of the floor plans...!
UPDATE: Hey! They credit WHM at the end!

White House in 3D

I've been playing with Peter Sharkey's 3D model of the White House again and trying to create a nice video from it, but I've been having poor luck. Google Sketch-Up is a little tricky to export from and Microsoft Movie Maker is even trickier to import into.

I've uploaded the raw Sketch-Up animation to YouTube, where it looks fairly terrible.



I've also uploaded the Movie Maker video to this site (it's about 35 MB). It looks better than the Flash-converted YouTube version, but Movie Maker does weird things like freezing on the frame after the frame the source video froze on, which sometimes puts a tree branch in the way of the view. But it's got titles and narration so it seems more polished.

I'll continue experimenting and perhaps try a different video software. I welcome any suggestions.

C-Span's White House Week

Don't forget about C-Span's "White House Week," starting December 14, which will include a tour. From the trailer, it looks pretty good. Already, I see it will give us good wide-angle view of the Flower Shop and Pastry Kitchen in addition to all the usual state rooms and family quarters. Still no hint of the Living Room and Master Bedroom or even the East and West Bedrooms on the north side, nor anything on the third floor. It would be nice to see what the Bushes have done with the Clinton's Music Room, at least. And it would be nice to the see the grounds in detail, especially the new pool house.

White House: Behind Closed Doors

The History Channel sneaked up on me and aired Secret Access: Air Force One and The White House: Behind Closed Doors tonight. I managed to record them, but if you missed them, you can still order the DVDs (SA: AF1 and WH: BCD).

White Gold and Jackie

Here is an awesome music video commercial for milk. Warning: if you watch for too long, you'll accidentally see the hour-long 1962 Jackie Kennedy White House tour.

Fail-Safe

Watched Fail-Safe this evening and added an analysis of its depiction of the White House to the Movies & TV page. Nearly all the WH scenes occur in the Sit Room, which is depicted as a concrete bunker with a handset telephone while the Pentagon and SAC have sophisticated video screens and speaker phones. Walter Matthau's math (60 million dead is empirically better than 100 million dead) is unintentionally hilarious today, but Henry Fonda is so presidential, you'll be chilled anyway.

Capturing WH video clips

When I first starting creating WHM, I tried to pull the official White House video clips on pages like Life in the West Wing to archive them in a more-or-less permanent place. But because of the way they are encoded (RealMedia) and hosted (some non-gov site), I couldn't even figure out how to link to them from WHM, much less save them and host them myself (I'm pretty sure they're government-created and therefore public domain). Before this administration retires to points west, I'd like to capture them so they're available in the future. Anyone who can figure out how to download (as opposed to just view) the clips, I'd like to hear it.