AV News 186 - November 2011
Is th e re e n c o u ra g e m e n t fo r firs t tim e e n tra n ts ?
Chris Noble (Mold Camera Club)
According to the RPS AV Group website 'The Group strives to expand the
skills and techniques of individual workers by encouragement, guidance and
involvement'.
I don’t believe that this was the case with the recent 17th National Audio
Visual Championship and in particular the way the pre-selection was
handled. I understand there was a need for pre-selection as the number of
entries exceeded the time available and I also understand that this preselection took place over one day.
This brings me to my first question – how was it possible to view and judge
all the sequences in one day when there were too many to be viewed and
judged on the two days of the Championship? According to the statistics
published for the championship 13 of 77 entries were eliminated at the
pre-selection stage. I fail to see how 77 can be viewed in one day and only
64 judged in two days.
One of the guidelines for entry to the championship is that entrants with
more than one sequence should prioritise them in case there are too many.
I am told by Keith Scott that not all entrants adhered to this guideline which
further necessitated the need for pre-selection. Would it not have been easier
and less expensive to contact these people and ask them to make a choice?
Instead the organisers went through a pre-selection process which resulted
in single entries being eliminated, while as the programme for the event
clearly shows, others had two entries through.
We at Mold Camera Club have recently established a sub-group
specifically to work with AV and I am happy to say, have a very healthy group
of 18 working together to learn about the medium and develop our skills
together, something I’m sure the RPS would encourage. We decided that we
had sufficiently good sequences to have a go and take part in the Nationals
and so between us we came up with 7 sequences, 6 of which were from first
time entrants. 4 of these first time entrant sequences were eliminated at the
pre-selection day. How many of the other 9 eliminated were also from first
time entrants? Is this encourag