Are salmon that silver?

Huzzah! I manage to get onto a film viewing machine in London at a film laboratory. I'm surrounded by my pile of archive film cans eager to see what's in the tins. The trusty ol' Vidette machine however has other ideas and refuses to play in forward motion. Okay, so I'll have to view them backwards. Fair enough. Ah! Because 16mm film only has sprocket holes on one side it also means that when I rethread the machine to play in reverse I also have to watch the films upside down. And err because it is playing backwards the rack line is wrong which means you see the top half of the film frame at the bottom of the picture and the spillover comes back in at the top. So, it's a film played backwards, upside down and with half the picture spilling out of the frame. Not ideal viewing conditions. Still, these machines seem like gold dust so musn't grumble and just get on with it.

Ahhh, the first of the old colour films. It's 1937 probably, salmon fishing on the River Tay it's early Spring with the snow still on the hills. LR Hardy walks proudly into shot in quite amazing technicolor brown tweed 'plus fours'. I've never seen actual 'plus fours' in colour before. The past really does come so much closer. It's alive.He hooks, lands and gaffs a salmon, so silver and blimey there's blood all over the place. Interesting how much more real colour feels. And then the Vidette breaks, the lamp switch apparently. The switch is the size of a door handle, nothing subtle here and nothing easy to fix either. Mind you the machine probably is about 50 years old too. They don't make 'em like that anymore.

Unable to open the treasure chest

I've been carting a huge stack of rusty, dusty old film cans around South East England most of week. That 70 year old dust really makes you sneeze. Problem is we can't find anywhere to look at the films and see what is in the tin.

When I trained as an assistant film editor 15 years ago, 16mm film editing and viewing machines were ten a penny. Every other door in Soho had at least one behind it. They seem however to have gone the way of the Yangzte dolphin and very quickly. Within a 100 mile striking distance of home I can only find two and no 16mm editing machines. So we have this big pile of film (and a couple of dolphins in the bath) and the frustration of knowing that the film can may contain something great but we can't view them. The films can not be put on a projector as it puts too much stress on the very old filmstock and would damage these the only copies.

We know that 2 of the films are pre-war and colour and there are not many of those around.

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.

Heading North

Yesterday witnessed a manic struggle to finish the edit of the film before heading up North for some feedback. We want to take the camera too, just to get the odd extra little shot in as we will be up at Hardyland in Alnwick. We haven't even got Alnwick Castle in the film yet so we must make amends - if the castle was good enough for Harry Potter then surely we need it in our film too.

Eek, the camera and production insurance needs renewing - that means we started filming one year ago to the day. A nice symmetry as we head off to get some feedback on the virtually finished film.

Wondering if the film will be finished by August

A recent post was about how I thought it takes 3 edits to get a film right. I must have written that as a mental message to myself, a vain hope that theory is the same thing as reality. We are starting that 3rd edit now and it becomes so clear that the film we actually end up with could be one of many. We have the material to make "the rise, fall and rebirth of Hardy's", or we could instead make it a film on the desire to fish and go fishing with beautifully made equipment and about fishing tackle which means something and makes angling richer. Then again we could make a film about why people are prepared to devote their lives to making the very best fishing tackle. And then there's the story of how fishing has changed over 100 years and not just with tackle but through increased wealth, better access, pollution and globalisation - all of which change our fishing. The list could go on. It depends on which story we think we can tell best and so will make the best film. Discovering the best of the material, interviews and locations takes a little longer than we thought. 3 edits my foot!

1st music for the film

Stephen the music composer delivered his 1st sketches today and we lined them up against some visual sequences, one of Ken Middlemist, one of the last of the Hardy fly dressers at work and another, a very poetic piece on fly fishing on the River Test. Both were fantastic, music is so odd in it's powers of elevation. Suddenly the music emphasises the story and a trout in the crystal clear waters becomes a character all of its own as it evades the hapless fly fishermen.

Ever so slowly the film does comes together!

3 edits make a film?

I hope and kind of believe that it takes about 3 cracks at editing a film to get it right. After that the law of diminishing returns tends to kick in, the film will get better but only incrementally so and often further edits just becomes different rather than an improvement. We have just about finished edit 2 and so I hope in a couple of weeks we will be there with the big number 3. Hmmm no doubt my theory is mere pants and soon I'll have to eat my words.