AV News 174 - November 2008
IRIS-25
Sir George Pollock Hon FRPS
The first five RPS International Festivals had Junior and Student categories,
but they were not very well supported, and this well-meant endeavour to
interest young people in AV quietly died. Digital AV has enabled a new start
to be made, but it took the vision, knowledge, and energy of Maureen Albright
to turn a theoretical possibility into practical reality.
She understood that to encourage young people to take part, she needed
simple rules, an offer of technical help, and the sort of prizes that would
appeal to the young: cash or its equivalent. It takes money to run a
competition, but thanks to the strong educational purpose of the enterprise,
the RPS Council were able to offer her a suitable grant, and outside
sponsorship was not required.
The name of the competition"International Review of Images with Sound”
condensed into "IRIS" (or did the acronym come first?) and the "minus 25"
referred to the maximum age of entrants.
Studying the programme
Maureen made every effort to publicise the competition, and one girls' school
jumped at the opportunity and sent in a group entry in the Junior category of
60 - yes, sixty - sequences! Unfortunately, the teacher in charge seems to
have misunderstood the purpose of the competition. Every entry was on the
subject of Spring (with a capital S), most of the rather limited number of
photographs were taken by two of the teachers and not the girls, the music
chosen was nearly always the same song by a group called "All Angels", and
the transition from one image to the next tended to be by one of a number of
'trick' changes available on the computer software.
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