Finally - Final animation

It's taken longer than we thought, but here is the final animated film edited to the recorded music.

I'm on with getting short documentary about the project completed and sorting DVD designs and covers. This should take a couple of weeks and then we will finally have the finished thing - finally.

One Night in an Old Church, Surrounded by Horns...

We arrived at Wolsingham Parish Church with plenty of time to do a recce of the area. We used this opportunity to find the nearest toilets (a mere five minute walk away) and examine some of the more legendary tombstones in the graveyard.

Equipment was set up, programs were folded, orders were taken for food, hangovers were dealt with and two unwitting members of 'His Majesty's Sagbutts & Cornetts' were interviewed. They discussed the beginning of the band, what tonight meant for them and how much their cats looked like Hitler.



The evening eventually commenced with H.M.S.A.C playing a set (I'm not sure if that's the correct term for it, but you know what I mean). Good stuff (I forgot to pick up a program so I can't tell you what they played). Nick gave his little speech about the evolution of the instrument that looks like a rhubarb again. I think he carries that thing around with him so he can talk about it at any opportunity. Filming was dealt with by myself and Ben, and photography by Mark and Danny. Getting consent forms from people was dealt with by James, who should have been paying more attention when the jobs were being given out. Only two people declined to give their permission and they were roughly in the same area, so that wasn't a huge hindrance.

The audience seemed to get the idea that the time to stretch their legs was after H.M.S.A.C's set, which proved that those programs were a waste of bloody time. After everybody got settled it was time for myself to make a complete mess of things with my speech. I'm usually good at them (honest), but I was out of practice and had to cover for somebody else. I received a sympathy clap (or maybe it was a 'Thank God it's over' clap) and everybody went back to being professionals. It shows how objective this blogpost is when I say the worst thing about the night was myself.

The film was finally shown to the excited throng to coincide with the new piece of music composed by Andy Jackson. I think I speak for the rest of my group when I say how suprised/relieved we all were at how well it turned out. The quality of the music was something we were all a bit worried about, seeing as we'd had nothing more than an awful MIDI file (imagine a mobile phone ringtone. From 1995) to work with. To compare the music from what we had worked with to the piece played in the Church was like comparing Epic Movie to The Godfather. The video (VDJ'd by the lovely Racheal Clarke) fit very well with the music, and only the end of the video seemed too fast for the music (I didn't notice this myself, but I was told by one of the financers of Museumslive! afterwards how much THEY had noticed it). The sound of applause from the audience told us that they liked it, and that truly was worth the past few months of work and meetings and being ill and everything else we had gone through.



Not that it was all down to us, as The Stanhope Silver Band partnered up with the H.M.S.A.C afterwards to play even more music. By this point I was spent, so Mark kindly took over filming as Ben had left, but everybody else continued to listen and show their appreciation.

After we had clapped until our hands hurt, some nice people were kind enough to be interviewed regarding their response to the performances. It's not bragging when you have the evidence to back it up, everybody interviewed loved it. We lost the takings, found them again, got told to get out by the assertive Church woman and the night was done.

My apologies if I have forgotten to mention anyone or recant something else that happened on this historic night, but this is all from memory. My memory of the event was a good one though, so kudos to everybody who performed, helped out, enjoyed themselves or just turned up.

If brass bands aren't as popular as they once were, somebody needs to tell Wolsingham this quickly as they haven't been told.