AV News 192 - May 2013
Is The Only Way Ethics?
Mold Camera Club
The Mold Camera Club AV Competition in January in their new venue at Clwyd
Theatr Cymru not only pulled in a good entry from the members but also raised
an interesting ethical question, but more about that later. Out of the 12
sequences, most were produced by various versions of ProShow with a few via
PicturesToExe and a couple through video software. The judge was one of the
joint editors of AV News, Jill K. Bunting, who having given a refresher lecture
a few weeks earlier was invited back to judge the results of her encouragement.
Jill’s general comments were perhaps the usual ones of making sure the
mouse cursor was not visible, making sure the sequence plays full screen and
that ProShow sometimes doesn’t project as well as PTE. These are things that
can sometimes be overlooked in the excitement and anticipation and hard work
in getting an idea from conception to the screen but are well worth reminding of
anyway.
First on show was ‘Butchart Gardens’ by Pat Venn taken on Vancouver
Island. Appealing to Jill’s own passion for flowers the gardens celebrate over
100 years in bloom. Very good close-ups and appropriate pastoral music were
let down by too many zooms and a rather fast start to the sequence. Jill’s advice
with zooming was to zoom out rather than in: zooming out reveals more of the
subject not yet seen whereas zooming in simply shows the same subject in more
detail, which does have its validity at times.
Next came Peter Wylde’s ‘Quarter to Three’ a slide/tape sequence recently
digitised. The theme is the original but unlikely one of a finally requited love story
between two steam locomotives and is one of Jill’s favourites. The author is a
renowned wordsmith and poet with an acknowledged skill in producing emotive
AVs; all the effects and variations in music served to enhance the story although
there was a suggestion that some of the slides may have suffered with age and
perhaps needed a bit of post-digital processing.
‘Time Flows’ by Paul Harper was distinctly different being a series of
time-lapse sequences of changing weather and the movement of water, a
subject Jill was meaning to try herself. With suitable music Jill thought the
concept was good but the changes were too staccato and didn’t flow, some
sections were too long, some of the sequences such as reeds had too little
movement and there wasn’t always perfect register maintained.
‘Images from Nature’ by Carl Boswell illustrated the author’s interest and
knowledge of the subject with some interesting dissolves from drawings at the
start. Many beautiful close-ups were let down by myriad of different transitions
leaving the eye unable to settle.
Angela Sgorlen presented the question ‘Whose Garden is This?’, a song
interpretation. Using AVI software the images came out a bit soft but the song
was not illustrated too literally, a good thing. Another sequence that would have
benefited from less zooming but Jill did wonder what the message was ultimately.
Another song interpretation, ‘Pen Calfaria’ (On Calvary’s Ridge), by Andy
Polakowski followed. A Welsh language sequence on the faith of Welsh slate
miners, this was provided with helpful subtitles which Jill thought sometimes
weren’t on the screen for quite long enough.
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