Buried Treasure

Reaction to the film so far has been great. This is the basic, unpolished version of the film I am talking about. We wanted a few okays before 'locking off' the edit and then going on to do all the nice stuff, the sprucing up of the visuals, adding an atmospheric soundtrack and music.

The only problem? - we also wanted to pick up the original Hardy film material. This is from the 1920s onwards and needs a little restoration so we can make it look really great in our film. Hey presto, a big pile of rusty, dusty old film tins arrive. The labels however bear little relationship to what we were expecting. A potential disaster. With these old 16mm film you can't just have a quick look to see what's in the tin, you need some kind of viewer which won't damage the old fragile material. I had a bit of a sleepless night that night thinking the original films we were hoping for must have been lost forever and so also leaving one very big hole in our own film.

Next day we head up to Alnwick and show our film at Hardy's. It gets a really great reception. However suddenly another large box of rusty, dusty old film cans turns up there. Nobody knows where they have been hiding but it turns out that these are the films we were originally expecting. Fine and great, our worries are over. However - what was in the earlier batch of film cans! We don't know. 16mm film is increasingly hard to view these days so I have booked a suite in London tomorrow to go and check them out. However it does look like they contain some pre-war colour film, probably salmon fishing on the river Tay as well as footage from inside Hardy Brother's Bondgate premises in the late 40's. Both are fantastically useful for us and our film. Only thing is we thought we were finished our edit. Hmmm, time to think again.