AV News 175 - February 2009
Impressions from Cirencester
Maurice and Liliane Dorikens
On Friday 19, Saturday 20 and Sunday 21
September the 18th International RPS
Festival took place in Cirencester. This
festival has always been a very
prestigious event - but also very
expensive. For the first time since 1994
we went to see it. It took place in the Royal
Agricultural College, where a nice hall,
restaurant and even lodgings (in sober
student rooms) are available.
The RPS people have a lot of experience in organising this kind of event (they
are for the large part still the same veterans) and the organisation was absolutely
flawless. The hall was nice and comfortable, but unfortunately badly blacked out
(a ray of sunlight kept creeping over the heads in front of us) and … the chairs
were horribly uncomfortable (those who had been there before had brought
cushions…). By our Flemish standards the projection screen seemed a bit
smallish for a fairly large hall. The hall was well filled with some 120 festival goers,
almost all in the category "grey or bald". In the breaks there was tea and coffee
aplenty, which we could drink outside since it was real "AV weather", i.e. glorious
sunshine.
For the first time in the history of the RPS festival it was completely digital. The
projection was flawless. An excellent Shuttle cube PC was used and not a wrinkle
showed in the images. The projection was conventionally in 1024 pixels (in
Belgium we have gone a step further).
The organisers had received 90 entries, of which 66 came from Britain itself, 5
from Belgium and -surprisingly- 2 from Norway. A pre-selection had be held and
71 AVs were retained, that were shown to us in 4 sessions.
We could not but remark that the British taste is something different from what
we are used to on the continent. The format 4x3 is still mostly used or in a few
cases 3x2. That our AV was in 16x9 format was found really odd. Movement in
the image is not welcome, it seems: zooming, panning, rotating is not wanted.
One or two simple effects in a sequence seem already very daring. Many of the
British AVs still consist of a succession of excellent images, fading in and o