AV News 187 - February 2012
Thomas
Linda & Edgar Gibbs FRPS
We have been members of the Magic Lantern Society for a number of years and
about 2 years ago Edgar received an email from someone we had met at a
camera club, where we had given a recent talk, saying there was a Magic
Lantern for sale in Ammanford. Not having been long retired, we decided to go
and see it and were pleased to find that it was encased in mahogany and had a
nice shiny brass lens. 'Negotiations' took place and we brought it home to take
pride of place on our sideboard.
Wanting more information,
we took the lantern,
together with a couple of
metal ones we had
acquired over the years, to
show Martin Gilbert, a
lanternist with the 'Gilberts'
Galantee Show', who not
only gave us advice on it,
but sold us some original
glass magic lantern slides
from the Junior Lecture
Series on the British Army.
In parallel with our interest in magic lanterns, Edgar had been researching his
family history. Both elements came together and our sequence called 'Thomas'
was to eventually emerge.
Visits to Colchester, where Thomas did his initial army training, Coggeshall,
where he met his wife and Ireland, where he was born and enlisted, provided
useful images. Additionally, hours and hours on the internet provided further
historical information. Once an initial script was written Derek Richards, who was
to provide the voiceover, and his wife Eira came for lunch and he read it out loud
for us. The hairs on the back of our necks stood on end and we knew that
Thomas had come to life.
The challenge was to
minimise the use of archival
images. Photographs of the
streets where Thomas was
brought up were not suitable
and so images taken in the
Ulster American Folk Park,
Armagh, were used, taking
the colour down but not
removing it. It was also at the
Ulster American Folk Park
that photographs were taken
of a wall sculpture that provided the faces of young Thomas, his sister, his pal
Patrick and the ghosts in the workhouse window.
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