AV News 187 - February 2012
Bolton CC’s Autumn AV Competition
Keith Atkinson
Bolton Camera Club's Autumn Audio Visual competition took place on Thursday
17 November 2011 when our guest judge for the evening was John Smith
APAGB CPAGB from the Rochdale & District Camera Club. John is the Joint Editor
of 'AV News' and his constructive comments and views were eagerly awaited by
our members wishing to improve their AV skills.
Ten sequences by members were shown, the first of which was 'Birdlife' by
Adrian Drummond-Hill - a series of images of birds taken in the Arabian Gulf.
John said these images were "unbelievable photography" and "superb, very
difficult to take." He explained that "the sound seemed to fade completely in the
middle and needed filling as the music needs to dissolve through with no gap".
Also an AV works well with a "third" image being created as two other images
blend together. This sequence could benefit from having one bird coming in on a
different part of the screen rather than on top of each other as the two pictures
blended together. John felt the titles were good and worked well.
Next up was 'Enigma' by Ray Jefferson which had a humourous opening few
minutes. John commented that "humour is difficult to do but this works well." He
also liked the "good use of the different fonts at the start" and felt the voiceover
worked well, especially with the quiet music in the background. John felt this was
a very good effort at the subject. A couple of negative points - the cars in the
house shot were "out of character" as they were modern in a period shot and
should be covered up by cloning the trees. He was left wondering how it would
end and liked the uncertainty of the good exit.
Third up was 'Rat Pack' by Mike Hesp which was a particularly large file at
nearly 1GB and which caused technical problems half way through when the
images locked. This was re-tried later in the evening, but unfortunately to the
same effect. It seems that the images were full size at 300 pixels when a smaller
size image at 72 pixels would have been sufficient. John explained that in
Photoshop there is a 'save for web' option which allows effective quality control
to reduce the size of the files. Despite the set back, he said from what we saw it
was "a great idea" and had "very good use of the stills." "The live sound mixing
was good and worked well with the images" and "the author had selected the bits
of the songs well". There was also "good use of blending of images."
'Salt Mines' by Gordon Hartley - John explained there was a problem at the
start with a full page of words and insufficient time to be able to read them. Maybe
it would be better to remove the full page of text and then spread out the content
as snippets throughout the sequence to build up the story. Some pictures would
be improved by cropping to remove ropes etc. and to get closer to the main point
of interest. The images were almost all on the screen for exactly the same length
of time and he suggested that a sequence works best if the image time is varied
to stop the change becoming predictable. John liked the good choice of the music.
'Bolton in the Snow' by Brian White had "superb photography" but more
effective dissolves could have been used between them and the images needed
to be the same size throughout the sequence. John also thought the pictures of
the countryside should be grouped together, then those of the town, ending with
the sun reflecting off the icicle, which was a "superb image".
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