If the Ambiguity link above doesn't work, try clicking here instead.
(See here for an explanation of why.)

I'm a member of an amateur film-making club here in Borehamwood. Their website is here. For my sins, I'm on the committee, as Secretary. I do what club secretaries everywhere do: take minutes of meetings; keep track of members' details, and deal with correspondence. Prior to this, I was the club's Programme Secretary. This meant deciding what we'll do at each weekly meeting and doing any necessary organising.

Every so often, I would schedule something called a "video exercise." The members get into groups and I gave them either a detailed beginning of a film or an outline of a complete one. They had to fill in the rest and then make a film from what they'd come up with. The idea is that less experienced people will learn something from working with the more experienced ones. (And with a bit of luck, the veterans will learn something as well by doing a film that's rather different from what most of them would usually attempt.) The Benchwatchers of Borehamwood was the result of one of these video exercises. The brief which I gave to the teams for this exercise is here.

Ambiguity was a film for one of my songs. I made it mainly by myself, with some help from another club member, Paul Fitzjohn. I entered it in a club competition, which was for videos based on or inspired by a poem or a song. It came second out of six entries. Considering this was the first time I'd entered a club competition, this was a reasonable result. I had been hoping it would win outright. As it turned out, the gap between first and second places was very small.

I made From the Earth to the Moon and Back Again as a parody of the interminable holiday films that some of the club's members delight in. It's got the lot - shots that run on too long, shots where nothing's happening, shots where the cameraman couldn't decide what to point the camera at, family squabbles, commentary that tells you nothing you can't see in the picture, and... something you don't get in a real holiday film... a surprise ending.

The Windfall was the result of another video exercise, this time to make a film where some things or all things are not as they first appear. Our group had quite a long debate on which of three stories we were going to film. I came up with a story, the screenplay for which is here. In the end, we took a vote on it and rejected the other two on the grounds that their stories were too complicated or some parts were going to be too difficult to film. (In other words, the one we chose was a cop-out ;-) I allocated two months to make this film. Altogether it took ten, so I hate to think how long the other stories might have taken!

Six Past Four is a video for another of my songs. I made this with my girlfriend Breda and her friend Veronica. It was a lot quicker to make than Ambiguity, above, partly because it isn't so technically ambitious (Ambiguity has about a minute of computer animation in it, which is very slow to make), partly because I had already recorded the song some years earlier (whereas I recorded Ambiguity specifically to make a video for it)... and mostly because we started making Six Past Four about six weeks before the competition that I wanted to enter it in!

Last update: 25/7/2020 17:09