AV News Magazine | Page 22

AV News 194 - November 2013 SPF AV Day Bill Barr SPF AV Secretary The Scottish Photographic Federation annual AV Day saw the return of Richard Brown as our guest speaker again, after a gap of 12 years when he came to Stirling in 2001. Back then he struggled on and off the trains from his home to New St. Birmingham station, and then at Glasgow to get to Stirling, carrying a large suitcase with very little clothes, but lots of boxed carousels filled with slides. Why is it that your connecting train is always at the platform over a bridge, when you have a heavy case. Nothing like that this time for Richard, he flew from Birmingham to Edinburgh with a small overnight holdall and a USB memory stick in his pocket. How the digital age has changed things. Richard gave constructive comments to the authors of attendee sequences, which got our AV Day off & running. There was a good mix of subjects from the authors, produced both in PTE and Pro-show. Our venue was a church hall so it was appropriate to start with the sequence titled ‘An interview with God’ the script was conveyed by on screen text, one of Richard's comments was that it would be vastly improved with a voiceover. We were taken to the Outer Hebrides with ‘Hebridean Weaver’ which showed a weaver making the tweed on the looms in his croft. When produced to standard the tweed gets the seal of approval - the Harris Tweed Orb Trade Mark. We stayed in the north of Scotland, this time on the Isle of Hoy, with ‘The Lonely Grave’ a sad story about a young woman who committed suicide. This is just a few of the sequences shown, we had a total of eight, which took us nicely to our first coffee break, after which Richard continued and spoke about the aspects of script writing, playing some short clips of voiceovers showing the different tone and emphasis on certain words which help to create atmosphere in the script. Before we knew it, it was lunch time! Jim McCormick was our second guest speaker of the day, so Jim got the afternoon session underway. Firstly he told us when he was a wee boy he came across a Magic Lantern in a cupboard in his parents house, which his dad said he didn't own, he was just the keeper of it, so Jim got to see his first projected slide show. Jim started the main part of his talk by showing ‘Civita’ (pronounced Che-veeta) one of the many good sequences he has produced over the years. This is a village 50/60 miles from Rome visited while on holiday, it is built on HY