AV News 191 - February 2013
Great Northern Festival
Ian and Brennan Neild
We have just returned home after attending
The 18th Great Northern Festival. I was first
introduced to this AV event, which is held at
the Wilmslow Guild, when attending a
Rochdale Photographic Society meeting.
Our speaker on that evening was Margaret
Curry giving us one of her slide shows and
at the end she left behind a few Great
Northern Weekend leaflets for anyone who
might be interested in attending. We picked
one up and decided that we would go along
and see what the weekend was all about.
Oh by the way, I'm Ian and you can see me here with my dad Brennan.
We thoroughly enjoyed the whole of the weekend and went back home
with our heads spinning at all the different styles of the sequences. We
decided that we would do it again in future years so here we are, back in
2012, for our 4th consecutive Great Northern Festival.
The Friday night lecture was the ‘Pale Blue Dot’ by Andy Lound who gave
a professional and knowledgeable talk about the earth and the universe
which included photographs from the space agency NASA.
We arrived on a very frosty Saturday for the national AV Competition. The
hall was full and we had 37 sequences to view. These were on a variety of
topics with some deceptively simple looking sequences and some humorous
items thrown in - one was quite short and, by the reaction of the audience,
took most of us by surprise. The day did not go without a hitch but this was
quickly overcome and every one of the sequences were shown. We even
saw a sequence showing ‘Yorkshire Street’ in our home town of Rochdale.
After handing in our audience vote slips we found that we had picked two of
the winning sequences but in different orders and not the actual winner!
Sunday was the North West AV Day. After a prompt start the show got
underway with 6 interesting and different attendee sequences and we
enjoyed the comments and feedback from the audience.
It was now the Judges' turn to put themselves under the spotlight. Firstly
John Smith showed us his humour through the sequences that he put
together and how he had done some work using the 3D effects. I will have to
go away and try this.
Next on was Brian Jeffs with his advice to ‘keep it simple’ I will also be
looking for that illusive ‘third image’ in the transitions.
Finally Keith Scott presented us with so much good information that some
of it was lost through the sheer quantity. Would it be possible to have some
of this made available in AV News? I didn't have time to take it all down!!
We have enjoyed the Great Northern Festivals and are looking forward to
2013. We hope that this will not be the last when Howard and Suzanne retire
as we have been made extremely welcome and the atmosphere is friendly.
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