AV News 179 - February 2010
Around The Clubs
Snods Edge Goes West
G e o ff C o e
A report on the RPS Northern AV Group’s first Cumbrian meeting at
Houghton, Carlisle on 18 July 2009.
As usual the meeting began with the viewing of attendees’ sequences,
which included: “The Bog Garden walk at Howick Hall” by Ken and Irene
Lillico; “Fountains Abbey” by Geoff Burdis; “Circle 4 Rally” by Val Burdis;
“Penrith snow” by Irving Butterworth; “It’s NOT a ****** tank!” by Geoff Coe;
“Greetings to Penrith, Australia” from Penrith CC; “Minerva up the Thames”
by Bryan Lindley; “Victorian Fair at Cockermouth” by Ian Jolly; “Stanley’s
Notion” by Keith Suddaby.
Our first speaker of the day was Ken Biggs FRPS, whose presentation
centred on two main notions. First, the stages in the construction of an AV
sequence: the idea, the script, the choice of music (often using advice and
suggestions from others), the creation of the soundtrack, the identification of
the required images and the creation of those images by taking, copying,
scanning, cropping, layering, masking, montaging and selecting. Ken
emphasised that EVERY picture should be seen as a potential competition
shot, NOT “it’s just an AV”.
His second major notion was that of using text, images, copies of images,
and masks, in stacks of layers of varying opacity – and saving, resizing and
flattening varying combinations of the layers to give the final images to use
in the sequence. Ken also showed us how to make icons for buttons on title
pages for sets of shows and emphasised his belief that you should ALWAYS
start and finish with a blank black slide, slow fades and click off from the final
black: DON’T let the end stay on screen.
We were shown several of his splendid sequences, including “Mary Ellen Best
an Independent Woman”, “One Man’s Dream”, “A Perfect Day” and “America”
both to enjoy in their own right and to illustrate the points he was making.
The second presentation was by Peter Appleton, who started by
emphasising that for him in the phrase “audio-visual”, both words are of equal
importance. With audio, the impact of poor quality is worse than for pictures
because the sound is there for longer. There is no excuse for poor quality
music (ripping from CDs, downloads), very little excuse for poor voice-over
(USB mikes are quite affordable) and very little for other sound effects (sound
bite websites). Using a consistent workflow of (1) acquire, (2) edit (using
Audacity, in Peter’s case), (3) mix (continuous or intermittent), (4) save, Peter
very clearly and ably demonstrated the construction of soundtracks in three
ways. First came the use of music with intermittent voice. Second was using
clips of voice, music and sound spread along the total soundtrack, using the
Envelope tool. Finally he showed the editing out chunks of track to get the
right length of music for a particular set of images.
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