Quarrypower and all that

It has been a while since my last post which is because I've been too busy to get round to it. Quarrypower has been and gone and the DVD is already on sale but to get it shot, edited and in the box on the shelf has kept me occupied. I also have edited the footage to provide the Youtube package and also the chapter for the year in the life DVD.

Boston Lodge on Friday morning

I used two cameras for the Friday shoot, the main camera which I used and then the older Sony with the clamp which travelled on the footplate of Leary from Pont Croesor to Beddgelert and then on the handrail of Hugh Napier from Beddgelert to Rhyd Ddu. I wasn't sure that it would be able to carry on working for the whole trip but apart from a few drop outs it performed very well. The angle and location of the camera made the shots only any good on sharp curves but I've used a few bits in the finished edit.

Waunfawr later on Friday

Over the three days I clocked up about 250 miles in the car, chasing backwards and forwards attempting to catch a shot of everything and as a result ended up with about 4 hours of pictures. The weather on the Friday and the Saturday was not too bad with only a slight splattering of rain a couple of times but the Sunday was a wipe-out with rain and wind being the featured weather. I spent the day at the PC down loading the previous days footage and starting to edit.

Waiting for Linda and Blanche on Saturday morning

On the Saturday I was lucky enough to get to ride on the footplate of Stanhope while it took part in the Bron Hebog cavalcade, thanks to the footplate crew of John and Dave for their forbearance. Narrow gauge locos don't have huge footplates and I do take up quite a bit of space.

Thanks to  Terry K Scott for the picture

On the Monday I finished a rough DVD edit and then set about doing a shortened version for Youtube. It started out at about 1hour and 15 mins which I needed to chop down to about 10 mins so quite a bit got chopped.

The Youtube edit

I then had a couple of days off which I spent asleep and trying to catch up with real life, Thursday I spent in the music studio writing and recording the first draught of the music for the introduction for the year in the life DVD. Friday I was back in Port and the final edit and captioning of the Quarrypower DVD was on my radar, however when I got in we got a call from Paul Lewin to come to Pont Croesor with cameras to get some shots of Stanhope and the WHHR's Gelert taking part in a photo charter. They both had demonstration freight trains behind them and both looked cracking. Along with the photographers we climbed aboard a couple of FR coaches hauled by Moelwyn and were taken to the Ynysferlas area near the two river bridges. Both steam locos then did multiple run pasts while the mosquitos took lumps out of my head, still itching.

We got back to harbour about 2 o'clock and promptly downloaded and edited a Youtube package of Gelert. With this uploading I set about trying to finish the Quarrypower DVD edit which now had a new section featuring the morning's jolities.

Gelert runs past

With Saturday came the final work on the DVD and eventually burning a master disk. I then needed to design a cover and on disk artwork, I used mainly photographs taken by Chris and Andrew for the cover. Once I was happy with these I went ahead and started to copy disks and print covers so just before home time on Saturday we had DVDs of the previous weekends gala on sale. Even though I say it myself it isn't too bad either.