Camera club's towering film ambition
Imagine waking up and finding the Spinnaker Tower had moved across the water to Fareham Creek.
This is what the Gosport and Fareham Camcorder Club has done with its new 11-minute film, showing the iconic tower being moved in a bid to put Fareham on the map.
The short film, called ‘On The Map’, was conceived by club member John Collier, to show what could be done with a bit of imagination and commonly available computer software. Mr. Collier, of St Catherine's Way in Fareham, said: 'The idea was to stretch the club members a bit and also to raise some awareness of what we do.
The idea just came to me as something crazy, but how can we film it so that what's going on has a bit of credibility and it built from there. I wrote the initial concept in October 2009, and had planned it as an April Fool for the next year, but it's taken a lot longer to get together. In terms of actual filming though, it's all been done in the past three months.'
The end result uses Club members and members of the Fareham Musical Society as actors and digital effects to 'move' the Tower.
For more information go to gfcc.talktalk.net.
‘The News’ - Portsmouth - Saturday 2nd April 2011"
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The 3 members of the Musical Society tend to stand out from the amateurs. They were the Council Leader, Councillor "Jane" James and the Marine Controller. The words of the script plus some introductory information about the character they were playing was enough for them to give a convincing performance. John Collier's original dialogue was very cryptic and I added dialogue to every scene - the Controller's dialogue in particular, where we had to explain away the Councillor James being a woman, where a man was originally intended. (Shortage of actors)
We started with 3 different camcorders, but after problems with the results from 2 of them, all the remainder was recorded on my Canon HV30 which has a lot of useful features for this type of thing. All the cameras we use are DV. (None of our members are using tapeless formats). Some of the sound was picked up from a microphone on a boom pole.
Obviously there were quite a few special effects - the Spinnaker Tower in Fareham to start with. We used a green screen for the News Presenter and the Weather forecast. I created backgrounds for these two scenes by recording several news and weather sequences and then picking frames of the recording where the presenter appeared in different positions relative to the background.. By making a selection from one frame and superimposing it on the other frame, I obscured almost all of the presenter and some touching-up did the rest. An animation program called Anime Studio was used for the animated graphics in the Control room scene and for the weather map. I edited some parts using Adobe Premiere on a Windows-based computer and these were passed over to John Collier on DV tape for incorporation in the complete production. He uses Apple-Mac computers, so sequences were converted by his computer to the QuickTime format. (I think the Windows-base format gives better results, but that's just my opinion)
A version of "On The Map" is now on YouTube at:-
Alternatively you will find it by going to our website:- http://www.gfcc.talktalk.net/ where you can also see some other short videos on the Showreel, including a couple of my animated films, "Petrified" and Daisy May's Day out".
Peter Jackson.