AV News 180 - May 2010
A Case for Conan Doyle
J e ff M a n s e ll
Phil Gee (left) and I
have been making
sequences together
for about 10 years.
He came into it from
his interest in sound,
I from photography.
We produce our
sequences together
meeting once or
twice a month, which is why it takes us years to produce one.
Having just completed a sequence, we were on the lookout for a new
subject. The local Midlands news was on the TV. I was not particularly
watching it but heard a feature concerning someone named George Edalji
and an incident that happened in the early 1900s in the village where Phil
lives, which was investigated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
I contacted Phil and asked if he knew anything about it, he didn't. We
started to research the incident. He spoke to his local history society and I
searched the Internet and we came up with many interesting facts and
thought we may have the makings of an AV sequence.
We wrote the first draft, which was nearly 20 minutes long and rewrote,
many times, until we were happy with its contents, although we felt there was
something missing at the end. Conscious that the story was full of facts, too
many can confuse your audience; we trimmed it as tight as possible to about
6 minutes. We asked my wife to record the narration, as we usually did. We
rarely use her as the final narrator, but find it easier to build up a sequence
when we can hear the words rather than read them from a script.
We set about photographing the area; very different now of course.
It had been a busy
mining area, all
now flattened. We
took pictures of
animals, pathways
and the church.
We had a day at
The Black Country
Museum, where
we got some of the
old buildings and
our images of the
gossips.
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