AV News 200- May 2015
H elig an B loss om s
Jim McCormick DPAGB
I became interested in AV as a result of attending an RPS AV Day at Wetherby around 1988, one of the guest speakers was Peter Coles and I have to admit, he lost me. I then became a regular attendee at the twice yearly ' Northern AV Group ' meetings at Snods Edge, which I helped to organise for a few years. But living in the North East of England we really were on the periphery of AV activity and as a result of viewing the work of other regional workers, I didn ' t think my work was good enough for competition.
At the ' National AV championships ' in 2001, Colin Balls introduced us to the latest advance in AV presentation, the ' Digitally Projected Image ', I was hooked. Early the following year I sold my Olympus camera collection, which I fondly referred to as my Japanese Leica, and went digital. My first serious digital camera was a 5 megapixel Nikon bridge camera, the results amazed me.
In 2011 I took the plunge and entered the National AV Championships, I didn ' t get a mention. In 2013 I decided to enter the Great Northern, once again I didn ' t get a mention, at least I was consistent. 2014, The Great Northern has a new venue, a new committee and a new competition; I ' ll give it a go. What sequence shall I submit? Remember there ' s a time limit.
Looking through my files I came across the photographs I ' d taken with my 5 megapixel camera in 2003 when we visited the Eden Project and the Lost Gardens of Heligan. The Eden Project was the first digital AV I produced, it was assembled very quickly using PTE v2.8 and was a pictures / music type presentation, with quirky transitions and on-screen text. In addition I also found a template of the ' Lost Gardens of Heligan ' that I ' d played around with but always thought it deserved more time spending on it. So was the new Great Northern the time? I set about reprocessing all the photographs, putting them into some sort of order, I rewrote and rerecorded the script, and it produced a sequence in excess of 7 minutes long. The next step was to sharpen my digital pruners, I snipped out the less than pristine photographs, chopped out parts of the script where I heard myself say " why did I say that?" and generally tightened everything up. The multi-track feature in the current versions of PTE is a great facility, allowing each voice clip to be inserted individually and moved along the timeline for precise placement; eventually I produced a sequence lasting 5 minutes & 41 seconds. It was awarded 2nd place in the ' Great Northern New Horizons ' competition, a mention at last.
But to have ones photograph grace the cover of the ' AV News ' was probably the greatest accolade. The picture was taken on that day in Heligan with my 5 megapixel camera, we had been walking through the jungle area and decided to have a seat on one of the benches, we took out a packet of biscuits and 30 seconds later the robin appeared. He sat on a rope fence opposite us waiting to be fed, I got my photograph, and he got his biscuit. In the original photograph he ' s sitting on a rope fence, in the sequence photograph he ' s sitting on a nicely textured log, I wonder how that happened!
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