On 11th June 2004 several club members congregated in the car park
of the conservancy trust near Andover for a filming event, that Phil
Martin had organised. We were given a briefing by a member of staff,
and then left to explore and prepare for the first of the displays.
There was a private group flying some birds nearby, and some members
practiced filming these flights while Phil organised his actor friend
Kerry and some cameramen as extras to film some sequences in one of
the hides.
The principal objective was to capture the various flying events using
multiple cameras and pool the footage to make a club film. There were
several secondary objectives to the day out. Tony wanted some images
for a photo gallery on the web site and he also had ideas of capturing
footage for use in his summer project film. Phil had a particular
film script he wanted to shoot. Francis started by capturing specific
shots of the entrance, and of members talking in the car park. Use
of so many cameras meant editing should offer many different camera
angles and cutaways. Mark had his cine film camera, which was obviously
not going to be easy to integrate with all the other digital clips.
Geoff was filming for Phil and Kate was using a stills camera. Peter
and Bruce were honing their manual tracking skills following the flights
of various birds.
There were 3 flying displays, at noon, 2pm and 3.30pm, which gave
members plenty of time for doing their own thing, like having a bird
land on their gloved hand. The weather was breezy and sunny much of
the time, and all agreed that it was an interesting day out, a good
learning experience with the camera and an event worthy of another
visit but without a camera to enjoy the displays not through a view
finder.
Phil hosted a pleasant social evening at his house on 27th July
with the various contributions being viewed and discussed. Some footage
was unedited, and there were examples of the use of auto focus showing
sharp background foliage with an out of focus bird flying across it!
Fast-forward became more frequent as the same events were displayed
from the different camera positions. Nobody was very keen to do the
collective editing to make a film, being no obvious storyline, so
Phil said he might manage to do something with it before the end of
the year. Harry has subsequently volunteered to try his hand at editing
it.
Perhaps later in the season we will see the results of this grand
day out.
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