Light at the end of the tunnel?

More filming today. We had to re-shoot just one short scene from last week, and things went well today, too. The main problem has been back-light as it's been sunny today. My workshop is long and narrow, and there are windows at both ends. Whichever way we face there is a light behind me, which affects the auto-exposure on the camera, so we have to find ways of working with it. But I think we do quite well, really.

Talking of lighting, I know it's a bit late in the day, but I've bought a new light stand - much higher than the site-light stands we've been using to date, and some reflective umbrellas. They are coming from Hong Kong, so I guess they'll take a few days, but I'm hoping they will give me a much more professional lighting effect.

Two unexpected things happened this week. First of all you may remember that a couple of months ago I bought some domain names, workshop-essentials.co.uk and similar. The one I wanted, workshopessentials.com was already registered, but coming up for renewal. Domains die a long slow and painful death . The owner had registered it 4 years ago, renewed it 2 years ago, but didn't appear to be renewing it now and I was keeping an eye on it.

Unfortunately, there are companies with robots to do this sort of thing. They snap up expired domains within seconds of the button being pushed, in the hope of selling them on at a profit. I didn't get there first.

I was fully expecting an email saying "Dear Mr Maskery, would you like to buy workshopessentials.com, it's yours for only 5K!", but it never came. This week I decided to see if the new owners had set up a site, and what sort of business they were in. I was surprised to be redirected to a generic For Sale site, and to cut to the chase, workshopessentials.com is now mine, and at no inflated price. I've paid $34 USD for 2 years, including page and email redirection. I'm very pleased. I don't understand why the previous owners didn't confirm their purchase, but I'm glad they didn't!

The other surprise was looking at my running times. I've been working my way through my running order, but not keeping tabs on the times. I decided to take a look, as one of my recent scenes was a lot longer than I had anticipated. I was astonished to find I had 1:50 of finished footage! And we are not fdone yet!

Now I always fully intended to give good VFM, but was anticipating 1hr+, not nearly 2, so now I have a dilemma. Do I release two DVDs simultaneously, or release No. 1 now (-ish) and No. 2 a few months later? I could physically put them both on one, but that would be daft from a marketing POV, as people won't pay twice as much for a 2hr DVD as they will for a 1hr DVD. Crazy, I know, but that is human nature. I'll have to think about that one.

No filming next week, both Bob and I have other things on the calendar.

Cheers

Steve

Back in the workshop

It seems like ages since our last shoot, and indeed, my trip to Sierra Leone has set me back about a month, but this week we set to again and got quite a lot done. I cocked up a bit at the end - the jig I'm making is a modified version of an earlier one, making it easier to use. Unfortunately I'd not quite got the geometry right, so I'm going to have to work it out properly and re-shoot. And we shot one scene with no sound... but all the rest is good usable footage.

It certainly makes a difference having a 19" monitor in the workshop. We can play stuff back instantly, rather than having to move upstairs to my office and do it on the computer every time.

I've made one or two changes to the plan of what I'm going to include in this DVD and it means that I hope to have the main shoots finishes in three more days. That's three weeks if we keep to schedule. I'm seeing a big difference in quality between the stuff we are shooting now and the stuff we shot before Christmas, I think some of the earlier scenes may get re-done.

It appears that I have offered to host a woodworking get-together in July. So far about 24 people have said they will come, so I hope the weather is good or else our lounge will be a bit crowded. I'm planning to do a demonstration video shoot on the day so anyone who is interested can see how we have done it all. It should be a good day, I'll light the BBQ, open a couple of bottles and see what turns up. One or two people have offered to bring along exhibits, too, so it should be a truly home-grown event. If you are interested, please sign up for the Nottingham Bash (5 minutes from J25 of the M1) on July 21st 2007at www.ukworkshop.co.uk.

That's it for now,

See you soon.