A mixed bag of a week!

Well I've had a horrible, horrible week, as far as the film making goes. Last Friday we didn't quite get finished what we had hoped, so Bob called in after work on Monday and we finished off. When I came to download it, it was all unusable. No prizes for guessing the problem.

As far as I can tell we have changed nothing, yet we were getting lots of interference on speech. Buzzing, but not a constant, just when I speak.

We spent ALL DAY yesterday trying out different settings, standing in different places, moving the receiver, changing the channel. All to no avail. I was very depressed last night, I can tell you. We've had other sound problems, but not this.

Anyway, I've had another little play today and improved it quite a bit, I'm not sure if I've fixed it completely, we'll have to see.

However, other parts of the week have been rather splendid. On Wednesday I went with Bob to a recording studio. His son is in a band and they were recording some songs they have written. I filmed them, and will put the footage to the music they have had recorded. It was an excellent day, I learned a lot about how the pros record, and, even though the music is not to my taste (has there ever been a music genre which wasn't loved by the youth of the day but described as "just loud noise" by their parents' generation?), it was fun to be part of it. The band had worked hard at rehearsing and gave their all. Pretty good for a trio of 15- and 16-year-olds.

The other good thing was a free ticket to a rather excellent blind wine-tasting. OK, it would have been better if it wasn't the evening before the music shoot (15 wines in an hour-and-a-half...), but it was fun. One of my wife's staff was there, and she has done a film-making course in Australia, where she used to live, and to cut a long story short, I now have a Canon XL1S sitting in my dining room. It's a few years old, but they still fetch a grand on Ebay and a new one (OK, a later model, but essentially the same camera) will set you back 2.5K.

Unfortunately there is one slight snag - there is no PSU with it so we can't turn it on! I hope she can find it, but if it has got lost somewhere between Sydney and Nottingham, then at least they are still available to buy. It's a LOT more complex than the camcorder we are using though, Bob will have a lot to learn.

I need to catch up with re-recording some of this useless footage, so today I've made a Stand-In-Steve out of some scrap. It's exactly as high as I am (although rather slimmer!) so I can stand it in place and get the camera positioned right, then just stand in the same place as the dummy. That's the theory anyway. I can only do this for fixed shots, of course, but quite a lot can be done this way, leaving the pan, tilt and zoom shots for when Bob is around.

Finally, I got a new contact lens this morning, and I can see properly again - Hurrah!

Up-to-date

Well Bob was moving offices yesterday, so he couldn't come over to film, but I've been busy. Despite having only one eye this week, I've managed to clear the backlog of footage.

I've come across a couple of problems though. One of the jigs I'm making is for creating accurate tenons on the router table. I've filmed the actual making, and then filmed the introduction and wind-up afterwards. I've discovered that the MDF baseboard is not quite as rigid as it needs to be, so I'm going to remake it using birch ply, and then re-film the top and tail. Viewers can then play Spot the Difference!

The other problem is... no prizes for guessing... sound quality. This is a real pain. I have a good mic, and yet I'm getting too much variation in sound. I had some friends round for dinner last night. One of them is a sound engineer (or rather an electronics engineer who specializes in sound equipment) and I showed him what we had filmed. His opinion was that the mic is too close to my mouth, and that the camera overrides the signal when it is overloaded. It makes sense. This is all because of my choice of shirt at the beginning!

Fortunately it is possible (but not terribly easy) to cleanup the sound in software, but it is time consuming, and still not the same as a proper "clean" recording. I asked him if the quality was publishable, and fortunately his reply was, "Oh certainly, I regularly hear worse than that". He's a straight-talking guy, so if he says its OK, I'm happy to believe him. So, with all its imperfections, I think I'm OK. I just wish I didn't have to do quite so much work to it.

I think I'll carry on with this for the rest of the DVD, and then review the position. I could use a head-mic, but it always looks ugly to me, and I wouldn't want to spoil my looks.....

Another option is to cover the front of my shirt with button-holes so that I can change the position of the mic.

I've fitted the new rails to my Xcalibur saw today. When I took them to be sprayed I forgot to take the fence with me so I could tell them the colour I wanted, so I just chose 1310 (I think) a generic and standard cream colour. The saw is grey..... I just need to attach a scale to it, but I've run out of sticky scales. The cheap ones are in imperial only, and the metric ones are expensive. I could drive for an hour and get one over the counter, but I've located the UK importer and asked for a quote on buying bulk. I'd have to buy a case of 80, but I reckon I could sell that many and still be cheaper than the like of Axminster.

I've also found a source of good-quality Bristol Levers at a reasonable price, so I'm thinking of offering hardware packs to make the jigs. All the specialist hardware that it is difficult to get in the sheds, enough to make all the jigs in the DVD. What do you think?

Right first time every time...

One of the by-lines that I have adopted for this film is Right First Time Every Time. It emphasizes the usefulness of a well-made jig, as well as encouraging efficiency. Of course we all know that very often workshop life (or life in general for that matter) isn't like that, but I still think it's a good maxim. Indeed you can read in the previous pages the many attempts we have made to get things right.

We must be getting better though, we got loads done yesterday, more than I'd planned to,.and I think only one scene required more than 2 takes. Several were, indeed, right first time.

There has been one fly in the ointment, this week, however, and that is I have a sore eye. I went for a routine eye examination on Thursday, and came out having been told they may have to admit me to hospital. Not what I was expecting!. Fortunately my sore eye was a lot better by Friday afternoon, so my incarceration has been put off. However, I can't see very much, I can't edit what we've shot, and I'm writing this not being able to see the screen very clearly - it's all very frustrating. In addition, I can't drive, so I can't retrieve my nice new saw fence rails from the sprayers.

After nearly fifty years I should be used to having dodgy eyes, but every time something like this happens, it's still an inconvenience. I suppose that it's a testament to modern medicine that for most of the time I don't have any problems, certainly far fewer than I used to have, say, 25 years ago; it's all too easy to take for granted the fact that shortcomings can be fixed by the NHS. I always remind myself that I'm lucky to have been born in a developed country in the second half of the 20th century. If I had lived a hundred years ago I'd be selling matches on street corners.

Bob can't make filming next Friday, so, eyesight permitting, I have some time to clear the backlog of footage. I think I'm more than half way through this first DVD, so notwithstanding the setbacks, I'm still bullish.

Whether it will ever be a financial success is another matter. I was looking at my books this week too, it's scary what has gone out, and neither I nor Bob are being paid for our time. I'm going to have to sell one heck of a lot of DVDs in order to retire to the Caribbean. I told Bob we all have to suffer for our art, to which he replied he didn't mind suffering for his art, it was suffering for someone else's that is the problem. Good point...