Press releases

We send a report of our meetings to the Farnham Herald and other papers each month. As the length that we can send is limited we now collect the whole of one year's reports on one web page.

Press releases are also available for 2010  2009  and for the years 2002 to 2008

After members of Surrey Border Film & Video Makers elected the new Committee at the AGM (Annual General Meeting) they enjoyed a talk explaining the latest cameras and editing techniques.

A new year and a new way to record videos. Our resident expert Peter Matthews assured us that to appreciate full High Definition video you need to sit much closer to the screen than normal. Once the surge forward and associated chair shuffling had subsided, Peter went on to describe how the small consumer cameras of today stored video on small memory cards in a file format called AVCHD.

Peter pointed out that the great thing about modern tapeless formats is that you simply connect your camera to a television to see thumbnails of each clip that is ready to play. This compares to the past when one had to scan through hours of tape to find what you wanted. Editing still requires a computer but even here life is much simplified by direct copying of the video file onto the computer. Once edited there are many options for distributing your creations, Peter's solution was to record onto cheap DVD disks, around 20p each, which, the way he does it, then play with full HD on a Blue-ray player.

We thoroughly enjoyed a selection of HD films, including some rather precarious and scary Axe Racing and an interesting short film on the Itchen Navigation. This latter film was made using the full HD video capability of a small pocket ‘still’ camera. Many people now have such cameras and so we can all become budding film makers!

Throughout the evening there was lively discussion, involvement and questions from the floor. Our thanks to Peter for this interesting talk and also to professional filmmaker, Mike Sanders, for his involvement in the evening.

Surrey Border Film & Video Makers met in February for their annual competition which had been postponed from December due to the snow and ice at that time. Members had submitted their 15 films back in November and had a long anxious wait until the weather finally allowed them to be shown and the judges’ comments to be revealed.

All were sad that the film judges Gwen and Alan Whippy were unable to join us from Kent due to transport problems. There was great excitement among members as they met to see the films sadly postponed from December. Each, of course, hoped their film would be a winner. With eight trophies waiting there was an atmosphere of excited anticipation.

The use of the French vernacular seemed to feature heavily in the judges’ comments as competition officer Mike Sanders and club publicity officer Neil Cryer paraphrased the judges comments in their absence. Taking it in turn to play good cop bad cop roles they lightened the tense atmosphere. A surprising number of the films came in for comments about problems with the levels of, or lack of, ambient sound.

All the films were shown including one converted from a 1960’s cine film. There were numerous holiday movies, an interview with a South African armed response unit and an extraordinary story of the Sultan’s Elephant. Members and all the visitors greatly appreciated viewing the wonderful creations and gave great congratulations to Alan Hussey who not only won overall but left the night with two other awards.

Members of Surrey Border Film & Video Makers were treated to an evening on animation when John Anscomb of the Staines Video Makers came and showed us his unique animated films.

John’s films differ from the other animation styles in that he acts out each scene using drawings with moving components. The nearest comparison that could be made was Captain Pugwash of many years back.

John was a graphic designer and illustrator by trade and he has harnessed these skills to produce wonderful scenes that told stories for his grandchildren, including them in the stories as video or photographs in the wonderfully detailed scenes. Each 10-minute film takes around 4 months to produce, most of the time being spent on drawings. The films are made entirely in-camera and there was not an editing suite in sight. We were able to look at the drawings and see how they were animated.

John and his wife provided the voices for the various characters and John’s experience as a punch and Judy performer clearly gave him the edge here.

The films had a lovely rustic charm and were incredibly enjoyable to watch and highly entertaining; the audience regularly laughing at the visual and or audio gags. We were treated to several of John’s films including fending off aliens, pirate adventures, planet colonisation, dragon slaying and a madcap inventor.

Members of Surrey Border Film & Video Makers enjoyed their first official competition evening of the year with the annual editing exercise “short cuts”.

The challenge was to make a film no longer than 3 minutes with no single clip lasting longer than 5 seconds. Films were shown to the assembled club members who scored each film in three categories: Entertainment (max 30 points), Story (max 30 points) and Editing (max 40 points).

In all there were nine entries submitted on varying subjects with the winning entry, by the audience vote, being Jeremy Bayne-Powell’s story of the Hindhead tunnel project. Runner up spot went to Sir Paul Holden.

We also saw a promotional film the club has made on behalf of the Road Hauliers Association, a selection of newsreel films from Clare Park by Sir Paul Holden and a preview of a film the club has just made for entry into the forthcoming Albany Competition.

Members of Surrey Border Film & Video Makers enjoyed a ‘BAFTA’ evening (surrey Border Artistic Film Tributes Awards). The committee watched 119 films to produce a shortlist of 30. These films were split into four categories: Best Script Drama, Best Script Non-Drama, Best Directing, Best Acting.

The hall was packed with members and our invited guests, some of whom were presenting the categories. First, we watched snippets from the 30 selected films, in a wonderfully entertaining homage to the British Academy, before moving to the final nominations.

The big winner was Val Hitchman’s film “The trees are back” which picked up two ‘OSCARs’ (Outstanding Surreyborder Creative Arts Reels) for Directing and Scriptwriting (non-drama) and a further three accolades for runner-up places in the other categories.

The successful “Cecil’s Law” picked up an OSCAR for Acting by Peter Francis and two runner-up places. Rita Wheeler’s “When Summer Comes” picked up the fourth category OSCAR for Best Script (drama).

Congratulations to the other members picking up awards on the night and a big thank you to our guest presenters, Bryan Harrison, Chris Dixon, David Fairhead and Gary Comerford.

Members of Surrey Border Film & Video Makers once again enjoyed an evening of film when we looked at winning films from the recent Guernsey Lily Competition.

Dick Hibberd presented each of the six films starting with a interesting suspense film. This was followed by a documentary on Yemen and its association with Khat. A subtitled German film preceded the break with a powerful and effective shots, telling the dark tale of child bullying.

After the intermission, we continued with a brilliantly original Polish entry looking at communal living, which was highly entertaining and wonderfully shot. Next up was another subtitled film from Germany, this time a hugely funny short film about giving up smoking; this was a very fast film that was really well made with some brilliant visual gags too.

Finally was the best in festival film, Dancer, told the story of a hit and run incident and the ruined lives it left behind.

Members of Surrey Border Film & Video Makers held a slightly different evening on the 1st July when they conducted their ‘film in an evening’ competition.

Three teams took up the challenge of developing a story based on the theme ‘easier said than done’ and started filming at 7:00pm. The teams had to have their films completed and handed to the projectionist in the St Joans Centre by 9:15pm.

Once the club members had assembled and teams handed in their DVD or tape, our competition secretary, Mike Sanders, explained to the audience that they were going to be voting twice. The first vote was for the best film of the evening, which was awarded to the Odd Bods for their film ‘Ministry of Special Interest’. The second vote was to determine the best film ‘with legs’ to be re-shot and be entered into the North vs South film competition; The Klondike entry, ‘I/O (Input/Output)’, was voted the winner here.

All three films put forward for the competition were amazing considering the time scale for the challenge and were thoroughly enjoyed by all.

As a wild card Harry Newman told the club his idea for an alternative story for the North vs South competition which culminated in a man standing in front of his ruined house. Also the third team, WriteAngle, showed us a polished version of one of their dress rehearsals for the film in an evening which they shot whilst on holiday

Surrey Border Film & Video Makers met on a warm August evening to see a selection of films from the club archive. Long time club member and Past Chairman, David Jackson, showed films in historical order starting with a video created from Super-8 Cine film, and others from an age when video editing was very different from today’s computerised wizardry. The early videos had to be edited by connecting a video player and a recorder together taking great care to press the play, pause and record buttons in the correct order and at the correct time. If a mistake was made then everything had to be reset and started again.

Early films included a Classic Car Cavalcade through Farnham shot in 1985, The World’s Longest Paper chain, a Community Film of a 1987 record-breaking event in Farnham, and a fantastic recording from a Farnborough air show, skilfully cut to music, entitled Aerial Ballet. This latter film revealed remarkable camera work capturing steady close up shots of aircraft flying by, which is incredibly difficult to do. Something, perhaps, only an experienced pilot with a very steady hand could achieve.

For many years the club has run a competition to make a complete film from start to finish in two hours, and David showed fine examples of this. Clearly with only two hours available some compromises always have to be made - but we saw that some members excel themselves in these circumstances.

Later films comprised crisp views of the Watercress Line cut to music; and an interesting view of a Club Meeting in the days before Video Projectors, when we had to watch our films on a domestic Television Set stowed in a cupboard in the corner of the hall where we met.

We also saw a nice friendly ghost story where the ghosts manage to save the lives of a party of holidaymakers by delaying their departure and so avoiding a train crash. This film revealed some of the tricks of the trade that can now be performed with modern computer editing but which would have been impossible with early methods.

The evening ended with a spectacular display of fantastic effects now available using modern Computer Titling and After-Effects Software.