The Runestone at Jursta

At Jursta, just north of Ösmo, about 40 km south of Stockholm, this runestone is found. For a long time I had been thinking about how to make an object movie of it. To find a way to let people rotate a 1000 kilo stone from the Viking era - with the help of a computer mouse! A number of suggestions where rejected before I found a simple but yet reliable solution.

For the photo shoot it would, for obvious reasons, be hard to rotate the over 2 meter tall, partially buried, stone. It would be considerably easier to let the camera circulate around it while taking the pictures. For a while I thought about building a circular rail system, but the ground was too uneven and if I really was to build something I wanted it to be a both mobile and flexible construction. The final solution turned out to be a long piece of string!

I placed the string around the stone and tied the ends to the camera. When I moved sideways (with the string stretched) the camera was kept on an fixed distance from the stone. A small water-level allowed me to hold the camera aligned with the horizon. The one problem I had was to maintain the camera's height, the result turned out to be slightly jumpy.

And this is how the QuickTime movie turned out:

This Runestone is probably from the 11th century a.c. Like most of them, it is not marking a grave, but is rather made in remembrance of someone. For those who are interested, I am here including the inscription with a translation below.