All this thinking about doing some shooting on 8mm film has stirred up a memory from about 25 years ago. Not long after I moved down to London and started working for the AV company Viewplan I was asked to go and operate a job one evening. I remember Stuart, one of the senior technicians and a Geordie as well, asked me if I had ever operated a 16mm projector before.

I said that I hadn’t and he said “Never mind it’s easy” and proceeded to give me a quick lesson on how to thread the film and operate the machine. Armed with the knowledge I had learned in the 5 minute tutorial I set off to South London in a van with a projector, screen and stand.

The venue turned out to be a room above a pub on the Catford one way system. I set up the equipment and gave the DJ a feed to run into his sound desk. The event turned out to be the annual get together of the Eternal Elvis fan club and my job was to run a three reel Elvis film before the disco started.

So I set the first reel going and when it ran out there was a pause while I moved the spool from front to back and threaded the second reel through the projector. When I started it running there was a repeat of the last few minutes as the film was really meant to be shown on a two projector set up that was sync’ed together. A little while later I repeated the procedure with reel 3.

At the end of the film the organiser stood up and made some announcements before the disco started. I was, at this point, standing on a chair next to the projector starting to rewind the film back onto the correct reels. Then I heard the organiser say and finally would you give a big hand to our projectionist Kevin! At which point 100 or so Elvis fans turned round, looked at me and applauded! I had no where to go – so embarrassing!

Today would have been my mum’s birthday, Sunday is obviously Mother’s Day and next month will be the 20th anniversary of her death. So as you can imagine this is quite a difficult time for me. This time last year I was in a really bad place and although I’m feeling a bit better now there is still a long way to go before I’m fixed! One problem is that I still haven’t got over the death of my mum who died far too young but with help I hope to move on in the not too distant future.

When I first started blogging about 5 years ago this issue came up and at that time I started to write about my memories of her but I didn’t get very far and I never published it. Well in order to move the healing process on I resolved to do so this morning to mark her birthday…..so here goes!

Jean Edith Shewan

1938-1990

There is a picture that I always think of when I think about my mum. It was taken on Christmas day and she is kneeling on the floor, smiling at the camera and holding up her arm to show off the watch she got as a present.

I guess the reason the picture stands out in my mind is that she was wearing the watch the night she died and afterwards my dad gave the watch to me – not much compensation for my loss but would anything have been?

She died far too young and at a very important stage of my life and the hole she left just hasn’t healed. It was such a big hole that for many years I couldn’t remember her before the onset of her illness. This single event that has had more effect on my life than any other and now 15 years later I’m only just beginning to come to terms with it.

Memory Flash #1

It’s lunchtime and my mum and nana (her mum) have returned from the town. They have been into numerous shops and now sit with a handful of till receipts doing what they call “reckoning up”. They will have been into both of the towns fledgling supermarkets, peas would be 1d a tin cheaper in Hintons than in Presto’s so they would buy them there. Binns, the department store, would have been visited to buy sausages, the only food my brother would eat and only then if they were the right shade of pink. Now they had to account for every penny, even if this meant retracing their steps 2 or 3 times, until every penny had been accounted for.

We were creatures of habit at lunchtimes and my brother and I always came home for what we called dinner. In those days we had an hour and a half for lunch so there was time to get to and from school. In any case we wouldn’t have eaten anything other than mums cooking so even after we moved house we still came home, even though it involved a half hour bus trip in each direction.

You could tell what day of the week it was by what we had for lunch. There was a routine to life back then that I’ve never been able to achieve in my life or my chilren’s lives since. I don’t remember them all but here goes: Mondays lunch would be made from the leftovers of what we’d had for Sunday lunch. If we’d have beef or lamb my mum would make a meal she called ash. This was a sort of stew with the leftover meat and potatoes in a stock. I didn’t always like the potatoes and would often leave all these little white cubes in the bottom of the dish. If we’d had chicken she would make chicken casserole.

Midweek we would have mince and dumplings, the dumplings would have been cooked in the oven and browned on top. Fridays, it would be fish fingers and chips because, well you always have fish on Fridays don’t you.

We went out for a meal last night and while we were there Ben had some crayons and post it notes. He started writing peoples names by sounding out his letters. He did mat, hanna, lillie, lissi, bex, mum and dad. He only needed a little bit of help with some of the harder ones!

I remember when I was young I watched a kids TV program which showed you how to do animation. I found it really interesting and wanted to give it a try. The only problem was you needed a cine camera that could take single frames and I didn’t have one of those. Even when we got my Uncle George’s cameras, that I mentioned in an earlier blog, they didn’t have the single frame utility.

Then the other day I bought a Bauer Super 8 camera from ebay for £3.20 – I wasn’t going to buy it but I discovered that it had the single frame ability and that childhood memory was triggered and I had to have it! Then it came to me that the video camcorder that I took the time lapse images with a few days ago might also be capable as it had the facility to shoot a quarter of a second at a time.

Then this morning I was sitting at the PC and Ben had left one of his lego men next to the monitor. A little while later I noticed a toy mini on the floor and an idea came to me like a giant lightbulb going on over me head. I put them in my pocket and took them to work with me.

I had meant to pick up my tripod but I forgot so I set up a little animation studio shown above, marking the position of the camera with gaffer tape. It wasn’t ideal but it worked. I used a reflector as a blue background – maybe it will allow me to chromakey a background in later! And yes – that is a Mac mini that I’m using for the stage!

So using the mini the lego man and some bluetac I made a couple of short animations which turned out quite well for a first attempt.

FreeVideoCoding.com

I was still working at 12:45 this morning when my phone buzzed to let me know an e-mail had arrived. I looked to see what it was and it was an automated e-mail to let me know that my friend’s blog had been updated with a private message. I don’t know why, perhaps it was the time it arrived, but I knew instantly that it was going to tell me that she had died.

When I logged in the title of the post “Very Sad News” confirmed my instinct. I’d known for some time that she had been ill, she had been diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus some time ago and she had undergone major surgery but her last post had informed us that her condition has worsened and that the prognosis was that she only had 6 months to live at best.

In some ways I guess it is better that she went as quickly as she did, at least she didn’t have to suffer a slow and agonising death. I feel sorry for her family especially “t’old man” and her two daughters and my thoughts are with them at this time.

Isadora was one of the first friends I made when I first started blogging about 5 years ago. She had been one of the first people to set up a blog on blog.co.uk and she had called it “Greetings from a Greeter” because she worked in Asda at that time and she would often blog about the strange events that went on in her shop. Even after I left blog.co.uk I still kept in touch – she was only one of two of my blog friends that I kept in contact with.

She had such a zest for life and could see beauty in almost anything. She had been a hippie in the 1960’s and had gone to some of the big UK festivals including the Isle of Wight events. She would often reminisce about her youth which had been quite eventful including a time when she had to be repatriated from Ibiza which resulted in her having her passport taken off her and when she wanted to go abroad about 30 years later she had to pay the £10 that she had been loaned to get home before she could get a new one.

She had a passion for music and Spain. She would often pack up her tent and head off to a local folk festival for the weekend and blog about the music and the dancers and whatever else had attracted her attention. She also went off to Spain regularly and stayed with a Spanish family she had met on her first visit. She had been taking Spanish classes and although she said she wasn’t very good – I suspect that she was really. I also seem to recall her taking up belly dancing at one point as well.

It’s such a tragedy that such a life should be cut short in such a cruel way, she was only just in her sixties and was looking forward to retiring and having fun. I for one will miss her dearly and even though I never actually met her I feel honoured to have been her (cyber) friend. And judging by the comments on her blog I won’t be alone in that.

Rest in Peace Isadora – the world has lost one of it’s brightest lights.

Oh my God we’re in the Sun

Back behind the camera but also in front of it! Time Lapse Photography of an afternoon in the edit suite!

FreeVideoCoding.com

In my job I’m usually the one behind the camera but last Friday I ended up in front of it being interviewed live on Sky News.

They came to film me outside of my work place after the story about the incident in Sunderland broke in the news. They had a small truck with a dish on top parked out on the road which uploaded the pictures back to the studio.  Even the camera had a wireless link back to the van! I was all hooked up with a wireless microphone and a earpiece so I could hear the studio and I waited in the cold like that for nearly half an hour!

While I was waiting I could hear the News program that was going out and the story before me was about 17 people being killed in Afghanistan by suicide bombers which made my story feel a little trivial in comparison! After the live interview I had to do a recorded interview and then the shot some cutaways of me using the phone (HTC please note free publicity) so in all I was out there for about 45 minutes and was absolutely frozen by the time I went back into the office to collect my things.

The ironic thing was that I ended up making all the mistakes I usually pick the subjects of the interviews I shoot up for – like looking away from the camera. I will bear that in mind next time I’m shooting an interview!

Then today BBC South East came round to film another interview in my living room.

I’ve had to take my entire website down for a few days due to the unprecedented amount of traffic. It was making our internet connection usuable and kept crashing the server. I shall put it back up once the hoo-hah has died down but shall continue blogging offline

Doodle-ring