AV News 197 - August 2014
"I c a n d o it in 1 "
Jeff Morris LRPS APSSA AFIAP
AV Makers South Africa - My committee was discussing ways of
increasing involvement of our members, and especially new ones, with
making AVs. We also wanted to get away from the pressure of entering a
salon or competition for the first time. We came up with this idea of a fun AV
exchange. I have not heard of it being done before in this way.
The club has about 50 members on the books, scattered through South
Africa, with very few actively making sequences. Some had never made an
AV and some were recruited at a regional beginners' workshop we had
recently held.
The great distances in South Africa make meetings with all members
attending out of the question. We function by email correspondence.
We announced the exchange and allowed about three months for
members to work on their submissions. The subject was free and the time
limit was roughly one minute, hence the name. It was billed as an exchange
and not a competition. There were to be no prizes or awards, just fun. We
kept up interest with regular reminders to all our members. About one
month before the closing date we asked all those who wanted to enter to
Register electronically by a cut-off date. All we asked for was author's
name, email address and provisional title of the AV. We could watch
registrations and chivvied privately those whom we thought should be
entering who had not already. We made it clear that only those who
registered would be involved in the later stages of the exchange.
All entries were via internet file transfer. We allowed a window of four
days for uploading sequences, well advertised in advance, and used the
service of www.wetransfer.com. Because the free version of
www.wetransfer.com only keeps links for a few days we had to keep the
process in a time window of a few days. All those who had registered were
sent clear instructions on how to do this with a list of the email addresses of
the other participants. The result was that each person uploaded one AV
addressed to all the others and received download requests from all.
The last step was to set up an electronic Comments form where
participants could comment on each other's sequences. This was kept
simple with fields for person's name, title of AV, comments on the sequence
and comments on the exercise as a whole.
Our exchange was a great success. We had 20 authors registering and
eventually 17 sequences were entered. At the last count, there were 97
individual comments - all positive