A small item on page 7 of the May/June Film and Video Maker announced that the Galloway Video Challenge, an instant festival, was to take place on May 26-29, 2000.  Brian Hazelden was reading it at home in the Isle of Sheppey ...

That was just over a week away, I was intrigued. A glance at their web-site, www.galloway-video-challenge.com, and I was hooked. They were expecting at least 30 entries. A team from Ireland and a film maker from Paris had left messages on the web-site. Galloway, it turned out, is just over the border into Scotland, and The Wicker Man, my favourite cult pagan horror film was shot there. The photographs on the web-site confirmed the stunning scenery, rocky cliffs, ruined abbeys, picture-postcard villages, stone quayed fishing harbours, mountains, forests and waterfalls.

The challenge is to shoot a video, maximum 8 minutes, in the 24 hours from midnight Friday to midnight on Saturday. Editing could continue on Sunday morning up to the deadline for entries, 12 noon. The films would then be judged, screened, prizes awarded, and then there was to be a party. Entries were welcome from anybody from broadcast professionals to first time film makers, no entry fee and cash prizes.

It was the most exciting thing I'd heard for months, I really ought to get out more.

The wife didn't totally agree. "I can't take time off just like that, I've got patients booked, and anyway, do you know how far it is to Scotland ............?"

Well somehow patients became unbooked, time off was taken and I didn't get quizzed on the mileage again, even though I'd looked it up. 448 there and 448 back. Good job it's a long weekend.

I was informed later, by somebody who knew about such things, that the key to success in pulling off a film in such a short time was "Planning. Months of it. Plan every last detail. Make sure you know your crew and that they know exactly what they're doing."  I'm sure he's right. One team had even pre-recorded a sound track complete with sound effects and mood music.

Monday 22 May 2000

It's as well I didn't know that at the time because I had four days to go and I still didn't have a clue what my film was going to be about. Mind you, I'd started thinking about it, and by the second cup of tea I'd written down a couple of things I wasn't going to do. That isn't as negative as it sounds. I'd decided that, with limited time, I didn't want to have to set up lighting or record live sound. I'd narrowed it down quite a bit really.

At the end of last week, which was when I first heard about "The Challenge", I'd thought about a short drama. It was to feature a "Scottish Widows" lady in a black cloak. Think more of Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant's Woman. The story was to be told in flashback as she walked the stone quays and windswept hillsides. It was going to take too much editing I decided, but not before I'd sent a message via the web-site requesting the help of a local acting group. So now I had an actress. No script, not even an idea, but I had an actress.

I headed for the shower. I'd been listening to "Celtic Moods", a set of CD's that feature harps and pipes in an Irish / Scottish way, trying to conjure up some images. The photos from the web-site filled my mind. By the end of the shower I had it all. The White Lady of Galloway was going to be the spirit of the earth. She would appear as a ghost in various picturesque locations with a poem type voiceover and a musical backing.

Easy! No live sound! External locations, no lighting. I'd better get on and write the poem.

A phone call to Bob Fryer, my contact with the Stranraer Theatre Group, confirmed that, not only did they have someone who could do the voice-over she also had access to a recording studio as she read talking books for the blind. Things just got better and better. Sheila Afia, our voice of the White Lady, was also in charge of the wardrobe for the acting group, another problem solved.  I started to think it might just be possible. I should have known better.

Tuesday 23 May 2000

A big parcel of maps, leaflets and tourist guides of Galloway arrived from Bob Fryer. He'd even marked the map with locations I'd said I was looking for. I spoke to Sheila (the voice) and our White Lady, Kay McDowall, on the telephone. They both seemed very keen to help. I recalled my dealings with acting groups nearer home, shook my head and smiled. Oh well, I couldn't sit around shaking my head and smiling all day, I had a voice-over to write.

I'd written enough by mid afternoon to give me the confidence to book a hotel. I explained "the video challenge" to the bemused hotelier, and that we needed room for our equipment and a table. Oh, and we might be up all night Saturday editing. "No trouble at all, sir. We'll be seeing you in a few days then."

Goodness, it was only a few days away. I finished writing the voice-over on Tuesday evening and e-mailed it to Sheila.

Wednesday 24 May 2000

I re-wrote the voice-over this afternoon and e-mailed that to Sheila. I was feeling pretty smug by now, everything organised, it had run like clockwork. The evening news showed that the floods were subsiding, but there was more heavy rain on the way for the bank holiday weekend. "What are you going to do if it rains?" the wife enquired. I simply smiled the smile of a man content in the knowledge that he had a back-up plan. Dammit, now she knows I haven't got a back-up plan. "If it rains I plan to shoot a film about a ghostly white lady in the rain", I answered truthfully.

Thursday 25 May 2000

I'm not too sure what happened to Thursday. I had planned to check all the equipment and get it loaded in the car ready for an early start on Friday. It was really quite late on Thursday night when I put the batteries on charge, decided to get up early in the morning to load the car, and went to bed.

Friday 26 May 2000

Setting off just after 9 am worked quite well. We missed the rush-hour traffic up to London and round the M25, headed North up the M1 and turned on the windscreen wipers. The finance news reported heavy trading in www.noahs-ark.com shares, and it kept on raining. "Tell me again how you're going to get the White Lady to appear as a ghost?" the wife asked between peals of thunder.

"It's quite simple really. All you do is shoot the scene, then, without moving the camera, shoot the White Lady walking through the scene. We simply put the empty scene on the first video track, the shot with the ghost on an overlay track and set the transparency."

It's possible she didn't even notice the nervousness in my voice over the drumming of the rain on the roof. I knew the theory, and I really had meant to try it out for real on Thursday, but you know what happened on Thursday. No, nor do I. Oh well, it's too late now.

The rain stopped when we crossed the border. By Dumfries the sun was out. We arrived at The Lochside Theatre, Castle Douglas, just before 5.00 pm. A very serious young man was registering just before us. I was thinking at least I'm not the only solo entry, when he asked for a carrier bag for his crew's T-shirts. Then it was our turn. We were made welcome, given T-shirts, an information pack with a locations book, maps and guides, some whiskey, some water, a free parking permit and an invitation to a reception later that evening. Very well organised, I must say.

I'd planned to record the voice-over that evening to save a bit of time on Saturday, but we were still 25 miles from our hotel, and the studio was another 30 miles beyond that, in Stranraer. We opted to set up the equipment in the hotel, freshen up, have dinner and drive back to Castle Douglas for the reception. We'd put off the voice-over until the morning, after all, we had 24 hours and the video only had to be 8 minutes long. Actually, we'd decided on a length of about 5 minutes, hoping to leave the judges wanting more, and that's about the only thing that did go to plan, the length. Oh, and there was one more thing we had to do. We had to test that our overlay "ghost" effect worked, otherwise we'd have some re-writing to do. I filmed the wife standing against the hotel room window and then the window on its own, captured the clips and tried the overlay. It worked a treat.

The reception in the bar of the Lochside Theatre was a lively affair with free beer and food, lots of very young, very professional looking people, one group sporting a BetaCam SP Pro camera, some female PR types and the festival organisers, Mark McLachlan, producer and ex-director of the Celtic Film and TV Festival, and Rex Pyke, a BAFTA winning independent producer, talking dutifully to one and all. One of the biggest things that struck me was the genuine friendliness and willingness to help that we encountered throughout our short stay in Galloway. There weren't many amateurs. We chatted to a couple of local members of SAM, the Scottish Association of Moviemakers, but everyone was keeping tight-lipped about their films. It was getting late, we had a little way to drive back to our hotel and a long, long way to go tomorrow.

Saturday 27 May 2000

We didn't get to Sheila's until 8.30, half an hour late, because we'd put off filling the car with petrol. Not a conscious decision this time, just that petrol stations are few and far between in this part of the world. Incidentally, so are cars. The roads here are so wonderfully free of traffic that I'm beginning to enjoy myself. The weather's dry, a few dark clouds about and quite chilly in the wind, but at least it's dry. All the "putting off" is starting to catch up with us, though. We've still got the voice-over to do, and I'm a little apprehensive of meeting our White Lady, I've not even seen a photograph, what if she's ....................Oh well, it's too late now!

Apart from a slight delay finding the White Lady's house things started to go better. Kay is a lovely fresh-faced lass of 16 with long dark curly hair and a beautiful personality. She had even found her own long white dress. A short detour to the wardrobe store for a shawl and we were on our way to the recording studio. What was the time? I hadn't got a clue.

Fortunately Sheila was a professional. Three takes, right through, straight on to my mini-disk recorder. She'd have done it in two if I'd set the input gain correctly. Now for the real thing, the filming. It must have been nearly 10.00am by now, but I was blissfully unaware. In fact nobody mentioned time, we had a job to do and we were doing it as well as we could, we weren't rushing it. I don't know why we weren't but we weren't.

We went to Portpatrick first, a fishing village, and filmed around the lighthouse. Then a white yacht came into harbour, it looked great in the viewfinder. On to the Mull of Galloway for high rocky cliffs and then Glenluce for the ruined abbey, and it wasn't even lunchtime yet.

We spent nearly an hour over lunch at the hotel in Glenluce. It helped warm us up, especially Kay who was wearing only a thin white dress most of the time. And besides, we only had to go up into the forest for the waterfalls, the trees and the mountains.

After tea and cake in the café at Glen Trool we finished filming about 6.00pm. The wife dropped me off at the hotel, so I could start editing, and took the stars home.

That's when things started to go wrong.

I intended to do a pencil edit, or log the shots with a pad and pencil, noting the good ones and the bad ones. I do this with all my videos. It was particularly important on this occasion as this was the first chance I had to look at the footage.  I fired up the computer, set the thing going on seamless capture and promptly fell asleep. The wife woke me over an hour later on her return from Stranraer. I was deeply asleep, and on waking, disorientated and in something of a panic. Looking back it was not really a problem. The tape was an hour long. Apart from deleting the last few files and recapturing the last 5 minutes, no problem. I didn't see it at the time though.

So how do we recover from a situation like this? We've now got less than sixteen hours to edit the film and drive the 25 miles to Castle Douglas. It was no contest, really. We freshened up and went to dinner.

I remember being quite emphatic that if we could get the sound-track down tonight we could do the overlay effects and video in the morning. After all it was quite simple really. I'd chosen a piece called "Women of Ireland". Yes, I know, but it sounded Scottish. It was an instrumental on harp and pipe that stopped at the end of each short verse. I chose it because it was going to be easy, a bit of music, a bit of voice-over, no problem. Actually, no problem if you stay awake.

Sunday 28 May 2000

1.00am Decision time. I'd tried and failed to edit the sound-track. We were facing defeat. It looked as though we weren't going to be able to enter a film. And do you know what? I couldn't care less, I just wanted to sleep.

Then the wife interfered with that infuriating logic of hers. The rest of the story relies a lot on the wife, so I'd better introduce her properly. Her name is Diane and she deserves a lot more credit than she gets for most of my films.

"If you can't do a voice-over with music, why not use just music?" I had warned you about the logic. She lifted my jaw and hit the play button on the CD at the same time. "That's no good," she said. "It might have been OK with a voice-over, but we need something stronger."

Apparently my snoring did not add the required effect.

"This is it." I couldn't argue. I copied it to a wave file and went back to sleep.

5.00am Editing time. It's all fairly straight forward from here. We have a sound-track 4m 50s long on the computer time-line. There's black at the beginning and end, all we do now is fill the middle bit with video. Oh, and don't forget those overlay effects you've been bragging about.  Actually, I was feeling quite fresh. A few hours sleep had worked magic.

Overlay effects? Yes, I remember. Empty scene on Va, scene plus Lady on V1. Click on the "overlay options" and set the transparency.

Hmmmmm! It looks OK, but only OK. It needs something else. Slow motion, that's it, put the girl in slow motion. On auto-pilot I went through the clips creating overlay, transparency, slow motion. I had a deadline. We were 45 minutes away from Castle Douglas. Allowing 15 minutes to render and then copy to tape and 1 hour to assemble the clips on the timeline, I had until 10.00 am to create the overlays.

AT LAST! A deadline worthy of me. A deadline I couldn't put off until tomorrow. Diane, with her infernal logic, had me convinced that something would go wrong at the last minute. What can she have been thinking about? Anyway, I agreed to finish the overlays by 9.30. I didn't, I finished them by 10.15.

• 10.15am I can't imagine that I spent the whole of the next 45 minutes arranging 5 minutes worth of clips on the timeline, adding a few dissolves and making sure the video fitted the music.
• 11.00am I think we've finished. Just add titles beginning and end, start rendering and head for the shower.
• 11.07am Rendering finished. Play back from the time-line and record to camera. Forget the rest of the shower.
• 11.15am We're on the road to Castle Douglas. Diane's driving, I'm counting the miles against the clock. We win easily, 2m 35s to spare when we arrive at the Lochside Theatre. But what's this? There's a notice on the door. The venue for handing in completed films has been changed to the IT Centre.
• 12.10pm Of course they accepted our film, and a couple that came in after ours.
• 4.00pm The four hours to the start of the film show were the longest hours I've ever known. Over the last few days we had been racing against a clock with hands that flew round. Now that clock seemed to have stopped.

Eventually the film show started. How was our little amateur film going to stand up against all those professionals? Pretty well, as it turned out. We were shooting with a Canon XL-1, 3 chip digital camera, capturing with a DV-Raptor card and copying back to camera, a set-up that means no copying loss whatsoever, and it looked as good as anything else on the big screen. It was even suggested by one of the organisers that the judges had marked it down for looking "too professional". Ho-hum! Apparently they found it hard to believe that such a high degree of post production was possible in the time. If they only knew the truth!

Awards

We didn't win, but when The White Lady of Galloway was mentioned as a contender for a lesser award a couple of people started to clap, (it wasn't us, honest). That made it all worthwhile. We'd done what we set out to do, well almost. In my opinion Diane's choice of music, an almost eerie, haunting piece called "The Music of the Spey", worked better than the music and voice-over I had intended.

The £1,000 BT Scotland Prize for Best Video was awarded to Trailer by Ed Dowding and Michael Keillor, video professionals from Edinburgh. Starring Stuart Wilkinson, a professional stage actor, and Nina Kitt, a recent drama school graduate, this 8 minute drama was about the growing apart of a couple. Pretty ambitious for a short film, but one that had to be shot in 24 hours ......? There are a good number of locations including travelling shots from both inside and outside the car. They managed with a crew of four, including Ed and Mike, shooting with a Sony VX1000 3 chip mini DV camera, and editing onto a PC based NLE system running Adobe Premiere, which unfortunately kept crashing. Apparently they hadn't started the script until Wednesday and were still honing and polishing it as they shot each scene. The actors didn't arrive until midnight on Friday and, although they had a copy of the script for at least a day, had not had chance to rehearse. It just shows you what can be done.

The £1,000 Hammerhead TV Award for the Best Video Edited In Camera went to Genevieve Anhoury, a professional video director from Paris, for Archie and the Witch.

The £1,000 Galloway Association of Glasgow Award for Inspirational Galloway went to another video edited in-camera, Tea on a Line by Robert Henderson. Robert shot the video between lunch and tea-time on Saturday on a full-size VHS Panasonic camcorder.

Tea on a Line also shared the £1,000 Scottish Power Peoples Choice Award with Out of Step by Philip Martin. 19 year old Philip is a composer who has set up his own music production company and, of course, the soundtrack was superb.

My personal favourite was The Honest Men, a superbly professional present day Macbeth by writer Andrew Niven and the other members of a film-making group who met at acting school in Edinburgh. The script was written specifically for the video challenge, to include at least 5 actors, decent dialogue (The Bard), an interesting location (the ruined Cardoness Castle), and to be as cinematic as possible. They had problems with wind noise which a music track composed from sight of the script alone, managed to cover. Shot with a Canon XL-1 and edited on computer, the group are to be congratulated on a superb production and they must be wondering what else they needed to do to win.

I also enjoyed The Galloway Holiday Project, by Lorraine Dabner. Despite being edited in-camera this was not a distraction, and the movie combined genuine humour with a delicious sting in the tail.

An "instant festival" is a wonderful idea, and one that I'm sure will spread. I can't wait for the next one. How about it IAC?

Story and pictures by Brian & Diane Hazelden - June 2000
Email: brian_hazelden@lineone.net

Visit the Galloway Video Challenge web site - and see the winners as quicktime movies.

Page updated on 21 March 2008

Authors' views are not necessarily those of The Institute of Amateur Cinematographers

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