Superpower and all that

Can't believe it has been over a month since my last post. Time flies when you are having fun and I've had a couple of weeks of holiday too... in which I did have fun.

Since Shrewsbury I've done quite a bit of video work, not all of which is immediately obvious as it hasn't appeared anywhere yet. I've been getting the Year in the Life 2013 into shape and have definitely decided on a 3 disk set as there is just so much to fit in. It was either that or do another Cob Widening DVD on its own which it doesn't really need yet, if I didn't do that now then no one would see what has gone on since the end of 2012, so 3 disks it is. We don't want to make it unaffordable so it will come out at £22.50 which will pay for the extra disk and the more expensive 3 way case.

I've been editing together a rough cut of the introduction using the music from last years one as a guide track and it is looking quite pretty. I just need to drop some shots from 1863 and all that weekend in and it will be fine. Once I finish posting this I'm off to the garage to start work on the music.

The biggest videoing project I've done recently is obviously Superpower. This was a three day shoot and I managed to amass about 4 hours of footage. Part of the fun was shooting the model railways which constituted a part of the gala this year. I used the GoPro to get a passengers eye view of Bron Hebog, a superb 009 layout of Beddgelert and the S curves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oL7gPM2BhBA

This link will take you to a longer version of this video on the Blog for the layout, definitely worth a read.

http://bronhebog.blogspot.co.uk/

There was never going to be enough for a stand alone DVD so I wanted to get a 20-25 minute package to add to the year in the life. It ended up as about 30 minutes but I didn't want to lose any more from it. The editing was a long job and took me just over 12 hours which I did on the Monday after the weekend. I made a rough edit which came out at about 40 mins and then went through and added captions chopping out some more at this point which took out around 5 minutes but my main aim on the day was to get a 10 minute YouTube package uploaded. In the end I had to bin some really nice stuff to get it short enough and even then I could only get it to 12 and a half mins. This is what you see here.

I came back to have another look at the year in the life version a day or so later and cut it down to the final half an hour version.

Rain coats on: the sun didn't shine all the time

Nice to see K1 back in action for the weekend

Princess made a guest appearance on the platform at Dinas

I don't think I mentioned my new toy, the new larger monitor which you can see mounted on the camera in a couple of the pics above. It is connected to the cameras HDMI output and is really helpful in being able to see the whole picture easily, this allows me to be sure that I've framed the image properly and it also means it is easier to see what I am doing when panning the camera. We got it half price too as it was end of line.

Having been working on various other bits and pieces I uploaded a couple of high speed runs to YouTube which people seem to like, I've done the FR and the Port to Rhyd Ddu bit of the WHR. The second WHR section remains elusive although I have put the wheels in motion to get a special train run to shoot the remaining section with a Fairlie as the Garratt mounted camera was unwatchable.

FR HST

WHR HST

Prince has just had a an outing to Birkenhead which I didn't go to but my second unit - Mr Focus or Chris Parry as he is known sometimes took some nice shots on his DSLR stills camera. I've still to edit this but I'll pop it up on YouTube as soon as it is done, hopefully tomorrow.

Castles and parks dept

To paraphrase Arkwright 'its been a funny kind of week'. I've been out with the camera but I haven't been on the railway but I've been videoing our engines, nonetheless.

First of all I went to Penrhyn Castle, the National Trust owned stately home which was built by the Douglas-Pennant family who owned the Penrhyn Quarry (and much else besides). Hugh Napier is part of their collection and has recently returned there in the company of Princess. On Thursday, the quarry Hunslet was in light steam so it seemed a good day to go and have a look. I also got some footage of Charles, sat forlornly in his cage in their museum. They also have some other interesting exhibits relating to industrial railways, mostly local but not all.

 

To complete the story of the PQR I drove down onto the quayside at Port Penrhyn and grabbed a few shots of the old port buildings there. While I was shooting one of the port officials came over and asked what I was doing but he seemed happy when I explained.

 

Next I drove up to the quarry and got a few shots of the inside of the place as it is now. Although still a working quarry it also has a zip wire for people to zoom down you can drive up into the quarry to their car park and see enough for what I needed.

 

To finish off the days shoot I drove up into the hills behind the quarry where you can actually see Penrhyn Castle by the Menai Strait and the quarry at the same time.

I'm making a chapter for the Year in the life DVD about the locos on tour in August and this will be part of it but it seemed like a YouTube edit was a good idea and this is what follows.

Yesterday it was off to Shrewsbury where Prince has been hauling the Ashbury coach up and down 100 yds of track in the flower show. I was amazed at the number of people in the show and they all seemed to want a ride. Excellent publicity for the railway.

 

I took a lot of footage, if I didn't get what I wanted when I came to edit then it would be too late. I even clamped a camera onto the loco for a few different angles. I was delighted that while I was going round the show getting a few GVs (general views) I heard the band master announce that the brass band on the band stand were about to play 'Men of Harlech' so I videoed the whole tune and used it as a background for the whole package. It is just the right length and nicely atmospheric. Anyway you can decide for yourself because here is the very thing...

 



 

After rain... midges

It finally rained the other night so I decided that I'd go and get some footage of FR trains and their waterfalls. The most notable one being at Tanygrisiau where the line crosses over the Afon Cwmorthin. Unfortunately the tree growth over the last few years has meant that the falls and the train are virtually invisible from the road where you can get to video it. However I got a few shots around the area and a reasonable crack at the shot I went for... sort of. After the train passed I walked up above the line to get some shots of the falls from above.

 

What waterfall?

How do the car drivers know when to come past to knacker my shot?

I must come back on a sunny day and get this shot with a train in it

 

After that I drove down to TYB to one of my favourite locations on the FR, Creau bank. Because it is surrounded by trees it gets overlooked but it is pretty much as tall as Cae Mawr. The stream which passes under it has a wooden bridge over a waterfall and it is all in a very pretty little valley which leads down to Llyn Mair below.

 

It was a while before a train was due so I contented myself getting some pretty shots of the water and so on. I thought that there would be more water than there was but this area is always damp being in the temperate rainforest which the side valley with TYB in it creates.

 

 

 

This is a bit of a new thing, shot on my phone so you can see the camera set up

 

Anyway once the down and up trains has passed by, I went back to Port to pop an antihistamine pill and then edit and upload the following little package. I set the pictures to a tune called After Rain as this seemed appropriate. Some people have commented positively on this and others moan; it is impossible to please everyone all the time but most of these shots have very little natural soundtrack and it also allows me to use the shot at TYG which has the car passing in front of the camera which you see in the still picture.

 

Here is the video, I rather like it.

 



 

Quarry Hunslets are like busses.

Well, OK they aren't very like busses except that they seem to come along in groups in my life.

 

In this instance its King of the Scarlets, or is it? It seems that like most of the preserved locos in this and its related classes, all is not what it seems. Because of the way in which they were used and maintained in the quarries, boilers, frames and tanks all got swapped around to keep the fleet running. This one has Maid Marians frames I believe and the tank from a different one... any way we call it King of the Scarlets and now it has taken the space which Princess formerly occupied in Spooner's.

 



The process of getting her inside was pretty much the same, but in reverse of how we got Princess out.

The grubby state of the loco is explained by the fact that when she was sold in 1965 she went to Canada, was put into storage and stayed there until repatriated earlier this year. The paintwork had been slapped on before the sale in 1965 but otherwise she is in ex quarry condition. The dirt is what 50 years in a barn can do for you..

A bit of fresh timber wouldn't go amiss

 

Next year she will leave the bar and go to Stafold Barn for a careful restoration which will get her running but keep the work worn look of her.

 

You can see the video of the process here. It looks quick in the video but took all day.



Apart from that I've been out and about with the camera capturing the railways in the sunshine, just in case it doesn't last.

 

 

Today I popped out onto The Cob work site and got some up to date shots of the work, over the last week they have laid some track past the signal box which now has windows with glass in and everything. Plenty to do still.

 

How time flies when you're having fun

I can't believe that it is so long since I last posted on here. Needless to say I haven't been doing nothing, far from it. The Easter rush which is supposed to die down hasn't and so the shops like the trains have been mad busy. Nothing to complain about but 'spare time' has been in short supply.

The Driver's Eye View disk is getting nearer completion, in fact disk one is ready to go in the boxes, the covers are printed, so are the disks. I'm just waiting on getting a final correction of the route names for the down trip and then it can hit the shops.

With the weather continuing to be fabulous I'm hoping to get the second section of the WHR in the camera this week. Fingers crossed. We've got a different microphone to mount on the camera which should help get a good sound track without the use of a separate sound recorder. Watch this space.

The year in the life 2013 is getting bigger by the minute and may end up as a three disk epic as the work on the cob widening is threatening to consume a hefty chunk of disk real estate.

Since following Griff Rhys Jones and his film crew about I've been out on several projects worthy of note. The first will add a few minutes to the Cob Widening chapter which was when The Cob was closed one evening so that a concrete pump and mixer lorry could pump the concrete into the shuttering to form the bases for the new signalling. Not glamorous and it was cold, too.

 

The second was a chase the train in the rain job when Bagnall, Isaac which Boston Lodge have been restoring for use on the L&B went for a run up the WHR with sister WHHR loco Gelert. Gelert's boiler ticket ran out at the end of June so the trip took place not a minute too soon. Unfortunately the weather was foul which limited the run. I got soaked to the skin and despite the camera's rain coat it got pretty wet too. Both of us have come through unscathed.

 

 

Isaac on the train and Gelert waiting to join it

 

You can see the video for this here...

 



 

The railway played host to some youngsters who play in a school Steel Band so not being one to miss out on a dance I popped over to Pen Cei to video them play.

The sun carried on shining and this made my next task a pleasure. Lilla and Hugh Napier with a selection of FR slate wagons spent the weekend in Llanberis on the Llanberis Lake Railway. Both these locos were Penrhyn quarry machines. Penrhyn and Dinorwig quarries were huge rivals so to see PQR black in the very heart of Dinorwig at Gilfach Ddu was quite something.

 

And here is the video. There will be a longer version on the Year in the Life 2013.

 

Busy, busy, busy

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 Harbour at Porthmadog



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 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.

 

Sunny sunshine

A bank holiday weekend and the sun was out. Unheard of. I grabbed the camera and off I went. I drove straight up to Tanygrisiau because I've been meaning to walk out onto the dam for ages so that is what I did, I walked about halfway along it and set up the camera; I would have gone further but I heard the train whistle on the other side of the Moelwyns so I knew I only had a couple of minutes.

 

After this I went down to TYB and got some nice sunshine pics without trains in. Flowers and blue sky etc. I had lunch and when the up train arrived I climbed aboard.

 

I went up to Blaenau and back to TYB again but some clouds had gathered over the mountains so I didn't get as much footage as I'd hoped to.

That was Saturday and on Sunday the sky was just as blue so when I left home for work I paused at the Pen Llyn end of Llyn Padarn to get some shots of Snowdon and the lake. I then decided that as the there wasn't a cloud in the sky I'd go to Porthmadog via Rhyd Ddu and get some more Snowdon shots from there.



 

Once I got to Port I decided to upload yesterdays footage to the computer and do a quick edit before going out to chase the WHR trains. In Port the cloud had rolled in from the sea so I wasn't sure if I'd get anything worth looking at from up the line. However, I needn't have worried as the sun was doing its thing as soon as I got away from the coast.

 

 

The Aberglaslyn Pass was my first port of call because although maybe over done as a location, it is still a lovely place. Sure enough 138 chuffed and clanked into view heading down hill.

The next place I could find a place to park was the other side of Castell Cidwm bridge as there were more cars driving and parking badly than I ever remember seeing. I know where all the swivel eyed loons were this weekend!

 

I then set off to catch up with and overtake the train but the traffic made this virtually impossible so the next decent shot I got was of the train departing from Waunfawr. I gave up at this point and slowly made my way back to Harbour Station.

I finished the edit and uploaded the package to Youtube before leaving for home. Whether attracting more people to the area is a good idea I'm not sure but it's grey, wet and windy today but it is bank holiday Monday.