The World’s Longest Picture

The idea came to fruition when we were sitting in a Skype call with the team from GigaPan, Mike Franz and Jason Larson, who were connected in from Oregon, USA, while I was in the RACV billiards room so early one morning in mid 2014. I was at the tipping point in the venture we called Picture The Coast, a venture to take one continuous image of the entire coastline from a yacht.

We kicked off the venture on Father’s day 2013 with the NSW coastline pilot with some funding and enormous interest from media and a variety of parties keen to commercialise the image in so many ways. We simply wanted to do something cool. Adrian Morgan was the photographer for this leg, and his buddy Keith Wiggins provided his yacht along with some navigational expertise. The results of that leg, as well as media coverage to date can be seen on www.picturethecoast.org with a link to GigaPan so one can appreciate the magnitude of the picture, and the venture.

GigaPan were in the business of taking the largest photos in the world and had, at the time, just photographed the World Trade Centre picture as featured in Time Magazine. I still remember Jason stating something along the lines of “we take the world’s biggest picture, and you guys are taking the world’s biggest picture….we have to be involved.”

So call it the world’s biggest picture or the world’s longest picture, but with 10,685 beaches across Australia, it was going to take up a bit of storage to say the least, and put together one kick ass panorama.

The challenge with the 2013 and 2014 leg of the venture was that it could be so many things to so many people, and the commercialization possibilities were endless. It’s a double-edged sword. But to simplify what we were trying to do, our product takes two forms. Physical and Digital.

We’ve had discussions with Google, Lego Foundation among others and have met so many interesting people along the way, which I’ll detail at another time. But the one that comes to mind was when Stirling Mortlock, the former Wallabies Captain, introduced me to Harold Mitchell, the media mogul, to have a discussion about the prospects of the venture. It was one of the most interesting conversations, which inspired me on so many level. The summary was that he said, “Is it a great idea? Yeah, and you’ll be remembered for a hundred years, but I don’t see how you could make any money from it.”

It was that one statement that made me later realise that everything needs to be viewed as a business, and what you do with the profits is what defines you as a person, and as a group.

On that note, I’d like to announce that 2015 is very different. We have secured a deal with the National Wool Museum in Geelong, in conjunction with Geelong City Council and Tourism Greater Geelong and the Otway’s, to be the first gallery in Australia to display a part of what will be the world’s longest picture – the part relevant to Geelong, being the Corio Bay and Geelong Waterfront. Padraic Fisher, the director, is the one that made this possible, and shared our vision, which happened to coincide with one of the museum’s present themes.

The plan is to display a 18m picture, along with some other relevant artefacts of the journey thus far. Unlike other exhibitions, the end product will be a public asset and for the museum’s ongoing usage in its varying creative exhibitions relating to Geelong and the Coastline. In the spirit of the venture, it is Picture The Coast’s hope that move, along with the planned global coverage will economically benefit the Geelong Community through an increase in tourism.

None of this would have been possible if not for Bernadette Uzalec, the CEO of the Geelong Chamber of Commerce (whom I know through the Deakin University industry advisory board), and it was her introduction to Roger Grant, Tourism Director for Greater Geelong & The Otway's that sparked the momentum to take us to where we are today.

If you would like to be involved in this venture, or some of the other innovative projects, please don’t hesitate to drop me a note.

Here’s to changing the world, one step at a time, sustainably through good business practices.

Photo's by Adrian Morgan