SPANISH ‘FAST FOOD’

At midnight on New Year’s Eve, Spaniards eat a grape for every stroke of the clock. The bells of Madrid’s Town Hall clock in the Puerta del Sol determine when the grapes are to be eaten, and not to stuff the 12 grapes into your mouth as the bells ring is considered to be an unlucky omen for the year ahead. Last year everybody listening to the bells had to eat twice as fast because the keeper of the clock, one Vincente Rodriguez, failed to slow the chimes down from the 17 seconds that it normally takes to ring out midnight to 34 seconds. He said afterwards that nobody had instructed him to make the usual adjustment! 

JOHN ALDRED

SUNSHINE GLASSES KEEP THE TROOPS AWAKE - PRODUCERS TAKE NOTE!

Ministry of Defence research has found a way of resetting soldier’s body clocks so that they can go without sleep for up to 36 hours. Tiny optical fibres embedded in special spectacles are used to project a ring of bright white light around the periphery of the wearer’s retina. The light spectrum is identical to a tropical sunrise which fools the brain into thinking that it has just woken up. Carefully timed naps lasting no more then 20 minutes can enable the wearer to stay awake for up to 48 hours. As it seems that working time legislation doesn’t apply to film production, people working in the industry may soon have to include a pair of these spectacles in their working kit!.

 BOB ALLEN

THE PIN DROP SYNDROME

 - YOUNG YANG RECOMMENDS CHIT CHAT TO RESTORE

YIN YANG

 The BBC engaged Dr Young Yan, a sound expert from Greenwich University, to investigate and provide an answer to the complaints made by accountants examining contracts, that their open plan office was too quiet. The accountants claimed that the silence made them feel lonely and was dangerously stressful (poor things). Dr Yan described the tranquillity of the office as quieter than sitting in a garden on a lazy summer afternoon. He recommended artificially reproducing the hub bub of working life by playing recordings of office noise, including chit chat and bursts of laughter. 

What an ingenious idea. The BBC were wise to employ a university professor to find such a solution to the accountant’s problems. So now £2,000 worth of audio equipment had been installed to cure ‘The Pin Drop Syndrome’ as Dr Yan called it, by providing the prescribed noise atmosphere and so quieten the accountants complaints.

BKSTS 24/25 Frame Meeting

The BKSTS held two meetings this year to discuss the still vexed question of dealing with 24 frame material in a non-linear, PAL environment. These took the form of a panel of experts each assuming a certain role in the post-production circus (lab contact, neg-cutter, editor, director, producer et al) and acting out a script before an interested audience. A certain amount of adlibbing went on when various members of the audience lost the plot, but as a forum for dealing with a complex and potentially tedious technical issue like 24 / 25 frame it worked very well. Although nothing startlingly original was said, various proven post-production routes were outlined in a lucid fashion and their merits and draw-backs discussed. The general consensus was that route three, 25 frame mute telecine-sound bent and synched externally -slow down within Avid / Lightworks, was the best for low-medium budget features for reasons of cost. ‘Internal synching’ (which I think is what AMPS is after) was to be confined to bigger budget material. Doubtless this will all change as drive space gets even cheaper and picture departments are given their action on hard drives straight from telecine instead of having to digitise everything in real time. What seemed to fox everyone was the question, innocently posed, of how to deal with a feature film on 35mm where the entire action was shot at 25fps? Imagine having to pitch bend an entire feature film across 6 or 8 tracks to get it to sound right at 24fps projection. 

NICK LOWE