I am sat out on the patio on a gloriously sunny autumn day looking for inspiration for a script. I am re-inventing myself yet again and moving into the production of Talking Pictures to liven up the gardening.ie website. It all sounds very glamorous but what I actually mean is that I have made a few silly clips to put on You Tube.
YouTube is an endless source of snappy home made films that are ideal for people with short attention spans, like myself. When I first started writing articles I used to turn to some trusty reference books, but now I surf the net. If I don’t find what I want in a couple of seconds I am onto another site. TV surfing is another indication of my short attention span. I can’t watch a telly with satellite channels, as I am too busy flicking, I tend to just make up my own story from all of the short clips I see when I change from one channel to another. I once watched all 50 channels in little boxes on one screen for hours until I got a very nasty headache and had to stop.
I got a bit carried a way with my first attempt for YouTube. The film is called “Recycling in the Garden” and I wrote the script whilst waiting in an airport lounge, which was a bad idea, as I had to wait two hours for the plane….. You can do a lot of writing in two hours….
Pacing myself isn’t my strong point and by the time I had recorded the piece and read the script it was up to ten minutes long and full of…. well rubbish really, which is quite fitting I suppose as it was about reusing rubbish. I really don’t like watching it back though as I have this slight grin on my face (stage nerves I think) that makes me look as though I am verging on self-parody.
SUPER 8
Although I came from the generation that only occasionally recorded their voice on a cassette player, I did do a couple of films using the Super 8 cameras back in the 1970’s. These required developing and manual splicing of the film. When I was ten, my friends at the time Matthew Beardsley and Barbara Hibbert and I made a film called “5 Years” (named after the David Bowie song of the same name that was popular at the time), which was about the end of the world. Not the happiest of titles, I admit, but it was great fun to do. In the film, Barbara and I were happily living in a caravan (an old green one used as a tool shed on an allotment if I remember) in idyllic bliss when tragedy happened. With the use of loads of red filters on the lenses, we ran around in various locations around the town and country, in true Edward G. Robinson manner, dying slowly as radiation engulfed the planet after the A bomb exploded. There were lots of scenes of us leaning on lampposts holding our throats and gagging as the toxic fumes finished us off.
We made it for a programme on the telly called Screen Test and, not surprisingly it didn’t win, get short listed, or even get a showing. It was good fun to do though if a little morbid and in hindsight it probably wasn’t the happy family viewing stuff they were looking for.
The other epic we did was of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. That really did last for hours. I played the part of Merlin the Magician, which thankfully spared me from having to wear body hugging coloured tights over our underpants and parade around holding wooden swords and cardboard shields. I did wear my mother’s oriental dressing gown and a pointy hat made from the top part of a traffic cone though, so in hindsight, maybe the tights would have been a better option. We never did finish that film as it ended up being too long, a bit like my first attempt on YouTube.
I am still no clearer what to do the latest short film clip on. My lad has offered again to do the camera work so I might try and jazz this one up a bit with some fast, jerky camera work like you see on Jamie Oliver’s cookery programme or a fast paced American drama series.
ANY IDEAS?
You could give me a hand here and send in some ideas. Are there any aspects of gardening you would like to be shown how to do on film? Send in your ideas and it might inspire me to put something together, as my short attention span has meant that I am now heading off and starting another project…. making the tea.
