Surrey Border Film and Video Makers press report for August 2009
A critique for Valley Films plus premiere of a charity project for Step by Step

Due to the absence of Chairman Rita Wheeler on a well-earned break in France, the evening was presented by Club President Sir Paul Holden. He first had to explain that, sadly, David Longley had been forced, at the last moment, to postpone his presentation of selected films from the last Surrey Film Festival to a future occasion for urgent family reasons; and therefore, instead, Sir Paul introduced a 65-minute showreel of films made by Valley Films, a group of six film-making couples operating in Kent, and introduced by their principal Director and Editor, Geoff Friend. Following this excellent programme, Neil Cryer chaired a discussion to solicit what we might have learned from these 17 short films, which could improve our own productions.

Most Club Notices were deferred until after the refreshment break, and the always-welcome informal chats between members. In particular, Val Hitchman sought urgent consideration of the two articles in this month’s Border Post, and further information on the website www.2daysleter.co.uk, regarding a national competition to make a 10-minute horror film involving certain specified items, with a maximum time in production of 48 hours (which can be spread over several days, of course.) Anybody interested in taking part should contact Val, or Training Officer Fred Hawkins, urgently.
Paul also asked for volunteers to undertake a Community Film to help a man with learning difficulties and behavioural problems to see for himself how his unacceptable behaviour impacts on others. Several hands shot up, so Paul will investigate the requirement further, and prepare a budget for possible Farnham Lions Club funding. Volunteers are requested to confirm their interest to Paul directly. The rest of the evening was devoted to showing the membership at large the recently completed PowerPoint presentation, which the Farnham Lions had sponsored SBFVM to produce for a local charity, Step by Step, which empowers single, homeless and/or unemployed young people, aged up to 25, possibly also with drug and alcohol problems, to take charge of their lives and rejoin mainstream society, giving help with accommodation, support, guidance, education and training.
Whilst Social Services provides help with funding the basic accommodation of homeless

Val Hitchman announces a new filmmaking competition

 people, no official funding is available to help with the ongoing costs of counselling. which are crucial to the main objective of motivating and empowering their “clients” to return to productive citizenship. Funding is so critically short that they have had to lay off four professional staff – hence the PowerPoint presentation to seek funding from Rotary Clubs and similar potentially funding organisations within their areas of coverage (basically the Blackwater Valley Area of North Hampshire and Southwest Surrey, although clients may come from outside this area.)
Step by Step had already produced their own PowerPoint presentation for this purpose, but it consisted solely of a series of slides, with headings for their speakers to talk to. What they had requested, and what the Lions had provided sponsorship for, was for SBFVM to “beef up” this presentation with video clips of Supporters and Clients giving their own accounts of the value of Step by Step’s work. Prior to showing the “beefed-up” presentation, Chief Cameraman and Editor Gordon Sutton explained to members what had been involved in this production. There was no script, but Director Rita Wheeler, Producer Paul Holden and Production Planner Val Hitchman had worked beforehand with Step by Step Community Fund-raiser Heather Turner to develop a list of questions for Heather to put to each participant, in order to get them to address the issues which Step by Step needed to illustrate. Because we knew that we were going to have to pick bits and pieces of sentences, perhaps from different “takes”, and perhaps eliminate “um”s, “er”s, and awkward pauses

(some caused by emotionally very painful recollections), we had two cameras continually running from different viewpoints and degrees of close-up, and also took cutaways of expressive hands and feet movements, etcTo help with covering jumps in the visuals whilst making cuts in the underlying soundtracks. And the interviewer’s voice is never heard. On two different occasions we filmed seven individual interviews with either Clients or Supporters, often with several “takes” of each until we were satisfied that, in one take or another, they had managed to put across the necessary views or experiences. Careful and complete transcription of these seven interviews, by Pam and Gordon Sutton (a really vital contribution to the success of the project - PH) resulted in 13 foolscap pages of transcripts, from which Step by Step representatives selected and highlighted the few sentences that gave the best message.
Gordon then edited the several hours of video down to 17 minutes, covering just the selected passages, and divided them up into smaller sequences to insert between the pre-prepared slides at the points selected by the Step by Step representatives. Creating the PowerPoint presentation on Gordon’s MAC-based computers presented no difficulties, but all sorts of unexpected problems arose in the conversion of the resulting files to a format which will run on everyone else’s PC-based computers and laptops. The team was most grateful for willing expert assistance provided by Neil Cryer and David Jackson, which had just enabled Gordon to solve these problems, and produced the deliverable DVD which would be passed to Step by Step at the weekend.
After this, for film-makers, the premiering of the actual PowerPoint Presentation was almost an anti-climax – but an outstanding contribution to the professional quality of the final result was gratefully acknowledged to expert Lighting Director Alan Hussey, whom we have only recently welcomed into Club membership. I concluded the evening with my heartfelt thanks to him and all the rest of the crew, without any of whose efforts the project could not have been so satisfactorily completed.

Paul Holden