Tuesday 19 February 2008

porridge

I've been having a chance to visit the real world recently. It's not as bad as I thought. We'd spent a year and a half trapped in the office and held prisoner by a film, or rather the editing of it. It might sound odd but since my release people ask me what the film is about and it is quite hard to define in a sentence or two. That's because while editing there's been an infinite number of stories and possibilities in our heads and the challenge of editing is to organise and select from all this. So what has been interesting is to go out and meet civilians, people who have no feeling for fishing, or collecting or Hardy's whatsoever and tell them what we're doing. Will their eyes glaze over, the drink slip out of their hand and roll across the carpet? You learn a lot from peoples responses, (even if they are British) no drink was spilled either. People and I mean ordinary people here, really latch onto that idea of craftsmanship. Their is a real sense of importance and an awakening that human craft is something that has to be valued. People want to talk about it. It's odd as I'm not sure that this feeling was around to the same extent even three or four years ago. Will the world suddenly beat a path to Callum Gladstone's workshop (Hardy's cane rod maker), or perhaps demand only a Chris Lythe reel? I'm pretty confident quite a few will.

Mr Hardy goes global

January saw us bogged down with the difficulties of making our film look good on DVD for the rest of the world. We shot our film on an excellent but relatively new format and realised that in some stages of our game the technology was off and running away before it could really walk. That's what happened when we tried to make NTSC copies for North America. Strangely the very expensive machine they use called an Alchemist and does all the jiggery-pokery would have had to down-grade the images we were so pleased with in our film. They would have lost their filmic quality. A new way had to be found to do the job and as running speeds are different over the pond too it created all manner of problems, mostly to do with making people mouths synchronise with what they say. I have that problem too but it's usually pretty late on a Saturday night when it kicks in.

However, problem sorted. Our man in the Midlands just called and said the NTSC copies of The Lost world of Mr Hardy have been pressed, checked and okayed and are now in the truck on the way to us. Mind you it's another big fog expected tonight so no doubt the driver will spend another couple of days driving around in circles lost in the wilderness off the Pevensey Levels.