I haven’t mentioned the film on here for a few weeks, so thought I’d post an update on the progress so far!
I was without my main computer for about two and a half weeks during February as it went off to have some upgrades …. the good news is that I now have two massive hard drives which will mean storage space for the archive and all the related material should be assured for a good while to come. Unfortunately it meant that work on the film had to wait until I got it back! In the meantime I took the opportunity to try and finalise what I wanted to do with the footage and how best to present it on a DVD. I took into account all of the comments which were received about the DVD I put out of my grandfathers footage of the Broads from 1950 – people said that they would have liked either some kind of commentary or background music to help set the scene.
Having put together the little trailer of clips of the cine film which were uploaded to YouTube, I found that the period music worked quite nicely with the addition of some on screen captioning to help identify the locations seen etc. I was always rather concerned that commentary might be rather obtrusive over the film, not to mention the difficulty in actually writing something to fit over it without having to keep stopping the film or doing some major editing work. Essentially, I just want to get the film out there in it’s entirety as it would have originally been shown, with minimal editing work to just tidy up the rough edges. Given the age and nature of the footage it was felt that some sort of introduction with a little background information about Broadland in the 1930s, the boats that the family hired and how a cruise was conducted back then might be useful, and with that in mind I got started on trying to write something suitable. This was written, re-written ….. and then re-written again! Once I got PC back I attempted to storyboard the introduction using clips from the film and photographs – and then revised it all again! Three demo versions later and I think I have finally ended up with something which is brief and to the point!
This week I have been tidying up the footage itself and am currently in the process of sorting out the background music. It helps to have a husband who has an extensive collection of obscure 78′s from that era! The final stage will be to add the captions over the various scenes and also the intro/outro credits etc. I hope that I may have the first demo versions of the whole film completed by the end of next week! Once I am happy with it then there will still be plenty to do – designing the cover and label, getting copies produced and updating the DVD page on the website – but if all goes to plan then I hope that the new DVD will be available to purchase by the end of April.
