AV News 174 - November 2008
The other four judges were all very experienced AV workers, Robert
Albright FRPS, Chairman of the RPS AV Distinctions Panel, Richard Brown
FRPS well known for his many international award winning sequences, Peter
Coles FRPS, who has a long history of working in education and is also a
major award winner internationally and finally Gerard Desroches EFIAP of
Luxembourg, another International award winning AV worker and the creator
of the French AV Forum web site www.diaporamaforum.com which
circulated the information among the large French AV community.
Unfortunately Peter Coles was not well enough to make the journey to
judge so the other four judges chose the winners.
So I had the dates, the judges, the venue booked and again no sleep, while
I waited for the entries to flood in! In order to give the entrants and any others
a learning opportunity I asked each of the five judges if they would give a
short talk about Audio Visual Photography on the Sunday. So we had a full
weekend Festival.
A few months before the closing date I exchanged many e-mails with a
teacher who was very enthusiastic about our plans. He encouraged four
classes at his school to participate and spoke of how enthusiastic the pupils
had become. He asked if they could share the photographs they had taken
as they were very young and were keen to write poetry to illustrate their work.
He planned to only enter a few of the best work but I told him to send all the
work and if necessary we would hold a pre-selection process. I was delighted
when the first entries I received was a CD of the girls' work. So we had sixty
individual entries. Good news, they had attempted voiceovers and had
written some interesting poetry. However not so good for the poor judges,
the school had obtained copyright for only one song, many of the entries
using this song and theme.
Other entries began to arrive by post on CD or by e-mail in a wide range
of formats. The sequences were as I had expected, not the usual AV work
but they illustrated what young people could produce and I was pleased that
entries came in from many countries. The ages varied from nine years old to
twenty two.
Page 18