The 1-minute, 9-second video begins with the dismantling of the old grandstand and concludes with the on Oct. 9 during the football team’s Parents & Family Weekend home opener vs. Williams.

The video’s still images were taken by a digital SLR camera mounted on a tripod in a second-story storage room in New Commons. Starting back on May 28, the camera took a picture every seven minutes, each of which was fed to an iMac close by.

To produce the video, Scott Tiner and Colin Kelley of the Digital Media Studios selected a subset of the 23,000-plus pictures, eliminating idle stretches, such as weekends.

View images of the time-lapse setup at Garcelon Field by clicking the thumbnails below.

The camera is a Canon Digital Rebel SLR.

The camera takes images every 7 minutes. This iMac display indicates that nearly 2900 images have been taken since the last re-boot. In total, the camera has actually taken 23,040 pictures since the May 28 start.

In a storage room overlooking Garcelon, digital camera feeds images to an iMac.

Zachary Abbott '14 of Rangeley, Maine, looks up at the time-lapse camera setup in New Commons.

Watch live video from Garcelon Field.:

Plowing up Garcelon Field on June 3, 2010. (Gabrielle Otto ’11/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Even forewarned, it was shocking to arrive at work on June 3 to find the Garcelon Field grandstand succumbing, after 71 years, to the force of machines.

Power shovels stood by, engines idling, while a man with a chainsaw went up and down slicing up the boards on which happy Bobcat fans used to park their fundaments. Underneath the stands, another worker picked up the pieces and pitched them into an Almighty Waste container. Rain poured down.

A grim scene, for sure — but let’s put it in terms of breakfast: You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and the omelette we’re talking about is causing big excitement among fans of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ athletics.

It will be served up in October: a fully renovated Garcelon Field complete with new lights, a modern FieldTurf playing surface and, yes, nice new bleachers seating 1,500.

Watch live video from Garcelon Field. Text continues below the video:

Mike Gustin of Facility Services, project manager for the Garcelon renovation, tells us that it took a mere two and a half days to knock down and haul off the old wood-and-steel stands. That quick and definitive operation launched a construction project that will see the playing surface in place by the beginning of football practice in August; the new Musco field lights and grandstand done in September; and the entire project wrapped up in time for Parents & Family Weekend and the first home football game, vs. Williams on Oct. 9.

The day the grandstand demolition was started, general contractor R.A.D. Sports of Rockland, Mass., also began rototilling the Garcelon turf, drawing flocks of birds to snarfle down the exposed worms. The first of several steps in preparing the field for the FieldTurf, the rototilling made it easier to strip away the existing natural turf (which has been stockpiled at the college’s Strawberry Avenue storage facility and will be recycled).

Since then, workers have continued to strip away soil and underlying sand — getting down to the subgrade, as Gustin explains. Next, says Gustin, the PVC pipes that have been draining the field since its last renovation, back in the 1980s, will be yanked out.

Stand falls: On the first day of Garcelon Field work, a front-end loader tills the field while workers raze the grandstand. (Gabrielle Otto ’11/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

A different drain has got to go, too: a very old clay pipe, running beneath Garcelon’s own drainage lines, that carries stormwater from the baseball field into Lake Andrews, crossing Central Avenue and Garcelon Field in the process. It will be replaced with a new 15-inch pipe routed near the New Commons Building and around Garcelon.

With all these old pipes, says Gustin, “we don’t want to take the chance that some of them could collapse and cause a depression in our new field.”

Also being extracted are electrical conduits, including one that connected the press box with the field. This intercom setup used headsets that allowed assistant coaches in the press box to view the action from an elevated perspective and relay plays down to the head coaches on ground level. In the days before electricity, pigeons were used to carry this vital information, but now, of course, it’s all wireless.

Once all the hardware is out of the ground, the field will be layered up again: first with a foot of gravel, probably by the 18th; then a geotextile layer that helps stabilize the whole works; and next a 15-inch thickness of crushed stone with new drainage pipes embedded in it.

Finally the FieldTurf will be installed. Unlike older artificial playing surfaces, this isn’t a matter of rolling out a big carpet of stuff and calling it good. Installing FieldTurf, instead, starts with placing a matrix of artificial grass and then filling it to a certain depth with a sand and rubber-particle mixture that affords good playing qualities. Gustin predicts late July for this final layer.

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update welcomes your questions, reminiscences and comments about campus improvements. Please e-mail staff writer Doug Hubley at this E-mail, stating “Construction Update” in the subject line.

The installation of FieldTurf at Garcelon means no more sloppy conditions, though rain and mud can produce archetype images, like this photo of Jamie Walker '07 carrying the ball against Colby during an October 2006 drencher that dumped 4.6 inches of rain on Garcelon Field. Photograph by Daryn Slover.

Land purchased along Russell Street (at upper left of photo) expanded the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ playing fields in the years before World War II. Photograph courtesy of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

Bob Hatch gives his 1960s-era team a chalk talk. Photograph courtesy of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

Garcelon Field as it was in the 1930s, with grandstands on all four sides. The old wooden grandstand burned in May 1939. Photograph courtesy of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

Football during the leatherheads era. Photograph courtesy of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

Created in 1899 with the help of students who wielded shovels and axes to clear pastureland, historic Garcelon Field will get a major facelift this summer thanks to a similar cooperative venture, this time between the College and its donors.

Approved by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Board of Trustees in May, the project will transform the natural grass football field into afacility by the start of the 2010–11 academic year. Lights and a new grandstand and press box will be in place by October.

• Watch live video from Garcelon Field.

A brief groundbreaking ceremony will take place at 4 p.m. on June 12 during Reunion Weekend near the south end zone of Garcelon Field, adjacent to New Commons.

In a campus announcement May 20, President Elaine Tuttle Hansen said that trustee approval depended on the project being both “fully donor-funded” and in sync with the College’s ongoing facilities planning effort, which will promises new residence halls in the Garcelon Field area in the coming years, among other long-range projects.

With $1.68 million already raised toward the $2.6 million cost of the project, trustees voted to begin construction while fundraisers work to close the remaining dollar gap.

“The Garcelon Field Project has afforded us a welcome opportunity to carry out an initiative entirely funded by donors,” Hansen wrote. (Typically, college construction projects are funded by a mix of resources that include gifts by alumni, parents and friends as one component.)

The Garcelon Field Project

http://vimeo.com/8532774 This video for the Garcelon Field Project outlines the case to restore and update the historic ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ field. Produced by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Along with football, the new facility will be home to varsity lacrosse in the spring and provide a wet-weather site for varsity soccer in the fall. The field “will also welcome all appropriate intramural, club and informal activities, and by providing a second artificial surface, it will open up the bottleneck for practice time,” Hansen wrote.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ field hockey will continue to use the AstroTurf surface at Campus Avenue Field, installed in 2000.

The specific FieldTurf surface at Garcelon will be Prestige Duraspine Monofilament. Like other current-generation synthetic surfaces, FieldTurf is considered better than AstroTurf because it features synthetic grass-like blades that are cushioned, or “in-filled,” with sand and rubber granules from recycled tires.

In the 2000s, because they could be used much more often, and retain their playability better, than natural grass fields while demanding less maintenance and no mowing or fertilizing. (The New England Patriots famously between home dates in November 2006.)

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ becomes the fifth member of the New England Small College Athletic Conference to install FieldTurf for football, joining Trinity (2002), Middlebury (2008), Colby (2008) and Hamilton (2009). All NESCAC schools have at least one artificial turf field for one or more of their varsity programs.

“In its current condition, the old football field does not meet the standards of excellence we hope to attain in all we do at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.”

Since the 1980s, the Garcelon Field area has evolved from an athletics quadrant into more of a campus crossroads.

Near the football field’s north end zone is the Residential Village (1992), while Pettengill Hall (1999) is just to the west. The New Commons Building (2008) sits a few yards from the south end zone, close enough that a net protects its windows from extra-point and field goal attempts. Nearby, two historic buildings of Garcelon’s vintage, Hedge Hall (1890) and Roger Williams Hall (1895), are being renovated and expanded for new academic use.

“In its current condition, the old football field does not meet the standards of excellence we hope to attain in all we do at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½,” Hansen wrote, and “it does not complement the state-of-the-art academic and campus life buildings in the surrounding area…. In completing that quadrant of our campus, we will further reveal to our prospective students and their families ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ commitment to high-quality and well-integrated facilities.”

Lewiston Sun Journal writer when he wrote about the project after it gained approval from the planning board. “Stuck in somewhat of a time warp, even as it rests in one of the most visible locations on campus, Garcelon Field is in line for its own facelift,” he wrote.

Garcelon Field debuted in September 1899 after a spring and summer of hard work that involved ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students who helped to turn the “rough uncouth pasture,” in the words of The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Student, into an athletics complex featuring a football field, baseball diamond, quarter-mile track and tennis courts.

Forgoing their “regular recitation work,” students helped clear the land and set cedar posts around the field. Their “resulting blisters and lameness,” the Student noted, was “partially compensated for by the good things to eat and drink, served them in the society rooms by the young ladies of their respective classes.”

Garcelon Field is considered to be among the 10 oldest college football fields in the U.S., and fields at NESCAC member colleges occupy six of the top 10 spots.