AV News 187 - February 2012
He thanked his fellow judges and complimented the authors on the high
standard of their work, then offered the following comments and advice for
further improvement. He pointed out the importance of communication with the
audience, maximizing creativity in vision and sound to stimulate emotions. He
said how important it was to maintain a consistent canvas size, to avoid jarring
the viewer and to try and avoid running times over 7-8 minutes. He urged
workers to further develop their technique, by incorporating harmonized
variations in image transitions and soundtrack, to create pace. Congratulations
to all those who received medals and commendations.
Several records were broken on the Saturday. The number of entries (43) and
attendees (120), including the authors of 35 of the sequences, were the highest
ever, with participants arriving from The Netherlands and Northern and Southern
Ireland as well as the rest of the UK!
On the Sunday about 60 people assembled for the final part of the weekend,
the RPS North West AV Day, hosted by Bill Greenhalgh. The day began with a
critique session, during which 6 attendees sequences were shown. The judges
from the previous day were asked to offer constructive criticism on each one in
turn. This proved to be a really good summary of what you should and should
not do in AV production! Authors were reminded not to incorporate too many
transition types, avoid gimmicks both in sound and vision and allow 'breathing
space' in commentaries. Dividing production into sections was recommended,
as well as aiming for quality over quantity. The importance of keeping titles
simple and taking care with the choice of text colour was stressed. The fact that
empathy with the audience is much improved by an expressive commentary,
rather that one that is just read, was also highlighted, as was the need to
carefully balance voice and music elements, to avoid the former being drowned
by the latter. Keeping the subject matter focused and the overall running time
down were considered paramount. Further comments were invited from the
audience following each sequence and raised some interesting and useful
points for discussion.
After the critique session, Jill presented some of her work to illustrate her
approach to AV production. Immediately after the lunch break Colin Balls and
Ron Davies screened their short tribute to Peter Coles who sadly died earlier this
year. Then Henk Tulp demonstrated some techniques for processing, sorting
and storing RAW image files with Adobe Lightroom and incorporating video in
AVs, using m.objects software. The day ended with a presentation by Martin Fry
who showed us some of his award winning sequences and gave us an insight
into their construction and the inspiration behind them. Once again the day
provided a wealth of ideas and information and an opportunity to see some
superb work.
On