Since my last post on here the camera and I have been out several times to capture the fantastic weather we are having at the moment.
The most important thing I've done is to shoot the video for the FR Driver's Eye View. Now I just need to do the second part of the WHR and the extras disk and I can get the much promised boxed set out.
The tricky part of this project is adding the titles with the route names. This took me a whole day and now I need to get someone with better route knowledge than me to check |I've got them in the correct places. We are also trying to work out a way of having the text in a closed caption subtitle so that they can be turned on or off by the watcher. So far this is proving to be a bit tricky.
As the sun kept on shining I decided to get out and video some trains and some bluebells. The flowers this year have been amazingly bright and plentiful so I drove up to TYB before the first train and wandered about in the woods taking video of bluebells and the lake and then stomped up to the railway just above Plas Halt where I got a cracking shot of Merddin on the 10:15 ex Port.
A quick trip back to Port and then back to TYB for a shot or 2 in the station and then I went for a stomp in the woods to get some more lineside shots. I thought I would be clever and cut through the woods off the path... this wasn't clever and involved me clambering over fallen trees and up to my ankles in swamp. It also involved me falling flat on my face and slamming the camera into ground, fourtunately only my pride was dented. I got to the lineside about ten feet from where I would have done had I followed the path and set up exactly where I would have done.
Yesterday the great weather continued which was fortunate as we had a visiting camera crew from ITV 1 videoing a segment for a programme with Griff Rhys Jones. It will go out in January next year.
He went on a specially run train consisting of Prince and carr 19 and the CRV, all of which looked a fine sight in the sunshine.
We chased the train from Port to TYB stopping a couple of times for them to shoot run pasts.
We then all climbed aboard the train and proceeded up the line stopping at Dduallt to do a run past. Once we got to Blaenau Griff left the train to go on his 'content rich' way and to make the rest of the programme.
I made a short and quite rough little package about this which you can see here.
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| The Harbour at Porthmadog
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The camera is mounted on a clamp which holds onto the handrail of the loco, Merddin Emrys in this case. This takes care of the picture but the sound from the camera microphones is too distorted and wind blasted to use so I also recorded the whole journey on the Zoom handheld audio recorder which is more controllable. I held this out the window of the carriage behind the loco so the audio image is very good. The two recordings then need to be synced together in the edit. This is relatively easy to do as things like whistles blowing make a very visually obvious waveform so I just slide the wildtrack recording along the timeline until they line up, mute the camera sound and hey presto, nicely recorded in sync audio.
The tricky part of this project is adding the titles with the route names. This took me a whole day and now I need to get someone with better route knowledge than me to check |I've got them in the correct places. We are also trying to work out a way of having the text in a closed caption subtitle so that they can be turned on or off by the watcher. So far this is proving to be a bit tricky.
As the sun kept on shining I decided to get out and video some trains and some bluebells. The flowers this year have been amazingly bright and plentiful so I drove up to TYB before the first train and wandered about in the woods taking video of bluebells and the lake and then stomped up to the railway just above Plas Halt where I got a cracking shot of Merddin on the 10:15 ex Port.
A quick trip back to Port and then back to TYB for a shot or 2 in the station and then I went for a stomp in the woods to get some more lineside shots. I thought I would be clever and cut through the woods off the path... this wasn't clever and involved me clambering over fallen trees and up to my ankles in swamp. It also involved me falling flat on my face and slamming the camera into ground, fourtunately only my pride was dented. I got to the lineside about ten feet from where I would have done had I followed the path and set up exactly where I would have done.
The upshot of all this mucking about is the following video which looks a good deal more tranquil than the shooting of it was.
Yesterday the great weather continued which was fortunate as we had a visiting camera crew from ITV 1 videoing a segment for a programme with Griff Rhys Jones. It will go out in January next year.
He went on a specially run train consisting of Prince and carr 19 and the CRV, all of which looked a fine sight in the sunshine.
We chased the train from Port to TYB stopping a couple of times for them to shoot run pasts.
We then all climbed aboard the train and proceeded up the line stopping at Dduallt to do a run past. Once we got to Blaenau Griff left the train to go on his 'content rich' way and to make the rest of the programme.
I made a short and quite rough little package about this which you can see here.
