Technical Information   

Movie Production Summary

Movies were shot on location in Boston using a Canon GL-1 digital video camera on Mini-DV tape. The raw footage was captured and edited in QuickTime format using Final Cut Pro software. The movies were compressed for web delivery using Media Cleaner Pro. The composites of the compressed movies and shot location maps were created in Macromedia Flash.

Map Production Summary

The map base data originated as Boston Water and Sewer (BWS) GIS layers and Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. The BWS data was clipped and tagged in ArcView 3.1. New map layers were created in ArcView by tracing scans of the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. The ArcView data was optimized using MaPublisher’s SplineArc tool and Illustrator’s Simplify Path tool. The data was exported from Illustrator as a Flash .swf file and imported into Macromedia Flash 5. Interactive buttons and functions were added in Flash and exported as .swf and html files for web delivery. Various building attributes, event lists and data base search strings are generated at delivery time from external xml files. The xml files are generated from a Postgresql database.

A detailed description of map delivery using Flash on the Valley of the Shadow project is available at this URL

http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/~cj8n/doc/mapit/

Database Structure and Design

The Back Bay Fens database consists of a series of Java Servlets developed in
house. One half of the architecture consists of a series of generalized
classes (called the Sibelius Library) for connecting to databases, executing
queries, and displaying results. The second half (BackBayQuery) consists of
site-specific sub-classes which create the look and feel of the design as well
as allowing for specialized features like "related records" display. The
servlets communicate via a JDBC driver with a PostgreSQL 7.1.2 back end using the Jakarta-Tomcat Java web server from Apache.

This site is best viewed with a 17 inch monitor set to Millions of Colors. Design and image enhancement peformed in Dreamweaver Ultra Developer 4.0 and Macromedia Fireworks 4.0.