- 1 · The town
- 2 · The story
- 3 · The build
Cromer in North Norfolk, from three of David Pickup's drone flights round the church of St Peter and St Paul. The footage hands over into the 3D at the same frame, then the town's history plays in nine chapters with archive pictures: the village the sea took, the flint tower, the fishing boats, Jane Austen's sea-bathing line, the railway, Poppyland, the pier, Henry Blogg's lifeboats and the storms. The camera drifts on one unbroken path, gliding to the tower and the pier as their chapters play. Then the church is built in front of you: the drone's view of it dissolves through six AI pictures made from that same frame, from the foundations of the 1300s to the new chancel of the 1880s, each labelled as an AI imagining and dated from the records. A site reading sets what was measured from the 3D beside what AI read from the frames: the sea defences, the roofs and the parking, each with the frame it came from.
What we measured
| Measure | Result | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Footage | 416 frames | Drone footage by David Pickup; three flights round the church |
| 3D rebuild | 26.0 dB | Checked against every 8th frame, which the 3D was not built from |
| History | 9 chapters | Each fact checked against two published sources; 14 archive pictures, each credited |
| AI readings kept | 4 of 11 | Checked by hand against their frames; the rest contradicted the footage and were removed |
What went wrong
- The first site reading asked about the sea on a frame of the church, and answered that Cromer has no sea wall. It now asks across all three flights and keeps an answer from a frame that shows the shore.
- A terrain scan with height-coloured dots was built for the town, then left out: it did not suit a heritage story.
What happens next
- A then-and-now slider between the archive views and the 3D.