Motto's Chev

[jim sewell]

Hi Dave
Keep them coming , very interesting.
Regards
Jim S.

[motto (RIP)]

Thanks Jim, there are not that many more of these to go and I would have got through them a lot quicker if I knew how to reduce them.
This picture shows a line up of the five regularly used GMCs and was taken at Victoria Park, the old Collingwood football ground that stood in for the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The MCG is where the Marines were actually accommodated after their return from Guadalcanal but it has been greatly changed since then.
One of the scenes shot this day was of the trucks loaded with marines arriving at the grounds. During the first 'take' I was driving the middle truck and we drove in under the stands. My front seat passenger accidently bumped the mal adjusted High/Low range lever into neutral and I rolled to a stop right in front of the camera and ruined the run. To make matters worse the engine was fumey and while non plussed as to what had happened I shut it down because of the hoard of people surrounding us and closing in ready to push the truck. I suddenly realised what the problem was and went to restart the truck but it didn't want to play any more. The battery was on it's last when the engine hesitantly came back to life. Having two hundred plus people watching and waiting for your every move is not a pleasant experience.
David

[Snowy]

Slightly off-topic but addresses your comment about the tediousness of reducing photos for posting.

This is a drop-dead-easy way of resizing, including doing in bulk with a single commandline command, no fancy or expensive Photoshop program needed:

Firstly, download the free/open source ImageMagick program from
http://www.imagemagick.org
and install. There are builds for Windows, Mac, Linux etc.

Once installed, open up a command prompt and go to your fullsize photos directory. (Best to practise on some test photos first)

Assuming you had a bunch of JPEG images you want to make a quarter the size of the originals, type the following:

convert -resize 25% *.jpg resized%03d.jpg

You should have a bunch of pics named resized000.jpg, resized001.jpg and so on. The %03 means substitute a padded 3-digit number for each image (This is an easy way to make thumbnails from originals.)

There are about fifty-seven million things you can do with this wonderful program - it's like a 100-bladed Swiss army knife for image manipulation, just take a look at the examples on the ImageMagick site.

Steve.

[motto (RIP)]

Thanks Snowy, I will certainly give it a go. Perhaps some level of competency is on the horizon but I'll keep working on the catapult idea just in case.
Photo:- Your worthy correspondent on location in North Melbourne with one of the GMCs.
Vehicles used in the filming were a mixture of purchased and hired vehicles a lot of which belonged to private owners. A GMC owner could expect to get $875 a day, a motorcycle owner $500. This would only apply if the vehicle was on set.
The clothing worn on set was of course fully supplied and once fitted was racked for use on later occasions by the same person. It was strange to have this outfit referred to by the wardrobe people not as a uniform but a 'costume'. Dammit! I'm a soldier, not a bloody fairy!
David

[Keith Webb]

David how accurate (or otherwise) was that dark green colour we see on US vehicles in the series?

[motto (RIP)]

The green colour used on the vehicles was a topic of discussion and no-one seemed to have a definite answer as to its accuracy. I had not seen anything like it before and yet must have seen restored US Marine Corp vehicles in my travels some of which would have been restored by Marine Corp nutters who got the colour right.
Some held that this colour was used as it would look right when portrayed in sepia tones in the finished production such as was done a lot in 'Band of Brothers' but that didn't seem to be used much if at all in this series.
The Marine Corp did paint their vehicles a different colour to the army I believe but I doubt that it was this shade of green.
Hopefully someone more qualified than I am on this matter will see this thread and make some pertinent comments.
David

[Lynn Eades]

My Dodge gun motor carriage belonged to the Marine Corp. The forest green paint over the top of the original army green was very dark, in the sheltered areas of the vehicle, almost black. It was a pretty rough paint job, with no shortage of runs. It still has "posting instructions" on the front guards, stencilled in yellow.