Press Release March 2004 - Report of film of grandchildren and house fire

There was an enticing mixture of films and talks for the March meeting of Surrey Border Film & Video Makers. The evening began with a short demonstration of how to paint out unwanted aspects of a video. The speaker had taken his grandchildren to Lion & Lamb Yard in Farnham to shoot a period film based in the early 1800’s. On earlier visits the street had seemed ideal with sympathetic lighting and at the time chosen there were hardly any people around. Imagine the film crew’s dismay when arriving to discover fairy lights blazing away and festooned all the way up the street clearly destroying any sense of the early 1800’s. The crew had little option but to go ahead with the shoot in the hope that the theoretical possibility of painting out the lights would be achievable in practice. The children’s acting was superb and so it was then up to the film editor to remove every fairy light from the final film. The talk showed members just how straightforward such removal of artifacts can be.

A series of films were then shown which had been produced by members in a competition whose theme had been the challenging subject of woods and/or brass. These were judged by audience vote as shown by a show of hands. The choice was difficult as the style of the films was so remarkably different. They ranged from a serious and well edited film of hand bell ringing with beautiful use of close ups and clips showing a mix of serious concentration and delightful fun to a short, 90 second, skit on three old lags who had just died and arrived up in the clouds at the Pearly gates to be greeted by St Peter who then