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The Surrey Border video club has just celebrated two major events in its calendar: the first the annual club competition to make a complete film in a single evening and the second the annual garden party. The ‘film in an evening’, requires the formation of teams who plan and rehearse in great detail in readiness for the event, which starts at 7 pm. The challenge is not only to get the acting right but more problematically the editing because the various shots must fit seamlessly together to make the final film. The greatest problem is the shortage of time which forces the shots to be joined together “in-camera” instead of with the normal slower and more reliable computer-based systems. This means that every shot has to be taken in the right sequence with a small amount of material to spare at the end so that the next shot can slightly overwrite it. This is reasonably straightforward until a shot has to be redone, whereupon the junction between the two shots can become very messy with too much of the first shot getting overwritten. With the clock ticking away, there is little room for error and great tension arises at any need for re-takes.
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After the hectic,
frantic but also sometimes hilarious filming, the teams rush to the club’s
meeting place in St Martin’s Church hall to view the results. This year, all the
teams were filming to the same, rather difficult, theme of ‘Unexpected Guests’
but all rose to the challenge. Of the five films shown, three featured insects
as the unexpected guests. With two of them, the audience found itself starting
to scratch in sympathy! The fourth film was helped out by the superb acting of a
visiting granddaughter who played a child gambling-prodigy; the fifth was a
family get-together with strawberries and drinks. All the films had lively
twists at the ends ranging from the discovery of fleas in the bed to granny’s
ashes coming to an irreverent end.
The following day was the club’s annual garden party held
in the many acres of a member’s woodland garden. Wine and beer flowed while
members tucked into an amazing range of delicious food which weighed down the
tables. For those with the energy after all that eating, there was croquet. Some
members took a leisurely stroll through the woods and others sat and talked.