Press release January 2004

It was a cold and dank January evening when members of Surrey Border Film and Video Makers arrived for a talk by former chairman, David Jackson. The turnout was large and members were warmly rewarded by an excellent review of the history of David’s film making, interspersed with numerous demonstrations and very useful hints and tips for our new year film making.

David’s presentation started with a jewel of an ‘accidental’ video. When he bought his first video camera, it came with a free tape which had been accidentally left on while the assistant described in highly over-optimistic terms what the camera could do. Members listened with great amusement to this sad indictment of the shop concerned.

Through his work in the Air Force, David had privileged access to the Farnborough Air Shows and so quickly became highly proficient at capturing aircraft in flight, a tricky subject for the rest of us. Consequently we were enthralled to view some spectacular pictures of aircraft doing spectacular aerobatics and manoeuvres. The photography was remarkably steady and very professional.

We heard of the trials and tribulations of old style manual editing of videos as compared with the ease of modern computer editing. It appears that in the old method of video editing one had to link all sorts of recorders and players together and then by careful yet frantic pressing of all the right knobs at the right times in the right sequence, one could, with luck, end up with satisfactory videos. It would seem that the biggest problem in those days was that to correct any errors one had to repeat all the frantic knob pressing again, whereupon more errors would rear their ugly heads. Ultimately one had to know when to stop. How dramatically different this is from the luxury of modern computer editing, where the computer holds all the instructions, any errors can be simply corrected and the computer re-run until the resulting video satisfies its maker.

Mixed in with the fascinating tales and films were some technical hints and tips including, among others, how to ‘film’ ghosts, how to film close-ups of insects, how to capture a flower unfolding. Of course the quality and fascination of the whole evening was not surprising as David has been teaching the use of video editing for the past six years or more. We all hope he will stay with us and continue to entertain