Mr Lenthall on studying human movement in Stevenage

Transcript:

And that made us think, well, there’s something extraordinarily consistent in human movement, and so we moved on then to study human behaviour on the highway system.  And since everybody told us that we ought to look at a motorist first – this was the character, once he got behind a wheel grew horns and tail, and he was a unique character and did all sorts of strange things – we started first of all by filming traffic movement, vehicle movement, and we did a whole series of pictures of junctions and car parks and movements at pedestrian crossings – all the places where you would expect to see problems.  And we looked at these back normally at about eight times normal speed because we found this was the one that gave us characteristics which we weren’t seeing at the normal speed.  And we were surprised at what we were seeing there.  It made us very curious as to exactly what was going on, and we moved on from that to actually studying the human being on its own, moving around – the pedestrian in other words – and we did a whole series of films on that, which resulted in a completely new approach to understanding how people move around.

Lenthall 1986