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!