Happy Saturday, world! To Celebrate this May 31 edition of the best day of the week, lets see how many of you remember this awesome little clip from a movie so famous and so iconic that I don’t even need to name it:
Remember that? Well of course you do! Its a scene that I bet has stuck in the head of everyone who enjoys scale modeling, regardless of your level of experience or devotion to it! It reminds me of something else much older, an awesome short story that I read in my childhood that I have never forgotten!
In 1963, a British author named Alex Hamilton published a story called “The Attic Express.” I first read it in one of those cool old Alfred Hitchcock collections! If you’re around my age, I bet you remember those; seems like every school library in America had them! “The Attic Express” was contained in the one called Alfred Hitchcock’s Supernatural Tales of Terror and Suspense, and told the story of a meticulous model train builder who builds a layout for his distracted and unappreciative son, whose fantasies about rail yards become very real and lethal when he “wills himself” into the model…in a way similar to how Adam and Barbara Maitland went to meet Beetlejuice!
If you’ve got a scale-model world in your life, haven’t you always thought about how cool it would be if you could somehow “shrink yourself” to scale and walk amongst your toys? How cool would it be to kick a few Redline tires in person, or open the door to one of your Matchboxes and sit behind the wheel? I know I’ve often wanted to do what the Maitlands did! It’s not like I want to be miniscule, its just that it would be so cool to see your toys and creations come to life like that! Well dear readers, thanks to today’s technology, we can just about do that very thing! In fact, today, I’m going to go visit Drag City in person, and I’m gonna bring you along with me!
Are ya ready??? In 3…2…1….
BOOM!!! How does that grab ya, darlin’?
It is I, your humble blogger, here at the track! Here you see me on the edge of the infield on the way to crossing over the gantry at turn 16 to visit the paddock, the most exciting area of the track! I haven’t yet met the driver of that beautiful silver Ferrari 250GT you see behind me, but I’m aiming too, since my goal is to try to score some interviews with some of DC’s better known regular drivers! And what better place to pin a few down than a visit to the paddock! So let’s go see who’s there!
Since its a late spring Saturday and the weather is perfect, you can bet the track is crowded, and there is both a muscle car and a sports car tournament this weekend so everyone is here!
While the Inspection Station is not open to the public, it is open to the man who created it, which of course would be me, so I’m gonna stroll right on over there and see what’s going out both outside and in. Come with me, dear readers, for a look at some of the “behind the scenes” action you don’t get to see as a spectator!
And finally: because I have “special clearance” and I’m taking you with me, let’s mosey on over to pit row and take a gander inside a couple of the bays! We can’t be too disruptive because it’s a busy day and the teams are scrambling, but we can take a quick peak inside a couple of the bays and see what’s in there being worked on! I poked my head into both the Jaguar and Porsche bays at each end of pit row, which were particularly active and saw some pretty nice machinery getting all primed for the track by mechanics who looked a little frantic! The folks in the Mercedes and Ford bays were so preoccupied that they made it clear my presence at that moment was not a benefit to them. Hey, it is race day; who can blame them?
Let The Races Begin!
The first action of the day was a ground-pounding muscle car race that kicked off at noon and ran into the evening! Even in the first heat there was some pulse racing moments!
Naturally, your H.B. got a seat in the V.I.P. grandstands so there was a front-row view for all the action! And these races go all weekend, so who knows what may happen next!
So by now, what you’ve figured out is that while AI is fun, it’s far from perfect: it does a great job rendering some cars and some parts of the track, but it’s terrible with faces! Honestly, we should be thankful for that, for reasons too obvious to have to explain! Still, I’ve been working on my “Avatar” for weeks, and as you can see, I still get slightly different results every time. It doesn’t do well with tattoos either.
The other area where it really falls short is rendering scenes that are very crowded and busy, like the paddock and the area around the inspection station: it does great with close up details, but when I ask for a wide angle shot showing a bunch of cars and people, it renders things out of scale and with very weird errors. Its kind of creepy, actually; eveything looks all distorted and fun-house like; reminds me a little of some of the scenes of the infamous “Snake Man” sequence in that excellent 1984 flick Dreamscape!
But you know what? I still think its mighty cool to see a machine make your world come alive like this, even if it does make mistakes! AI means the world of storytelling is going to change forever, but maybe its not gone; its just going to be different! The Attic Express isn’t lost; it just moved to the basement! Now, let’s see what adventures we can come up with next here at DRAG CITY!
I think this is amazing and really cool. It’s such a different perspective, seeing Drag City in this way with cars and tableau’s brought to life. Drag City is still real and your right, it’s just a different way of telling the story. It is neat to see these scenes we recognize from the layout as well as our humble blogger right in the middle! I too have thought about climbing into one of the little cars and driving around or riding inside my train set around Harrisonburg. There is a One Step Beyond episode about a train set that I’ll have to find. I think all is really cool and just adds one more layer to the tapestry of Drag City!
Thanks for the feedback. And that’s the idea: to add a layer. The AI enhancements should augment, not replace, the “real toys.” Storytelling is in-flux right now, but since “The Lore” of the track and its history, the cars, and their drivers is such a big part of this blog, I hope that I’m adding a new dimension to the storytelling without alienating any core audience. As writers, there is no way to fight this: embrace it, or be replaced.