SciCast tapes

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Remember all that tape stock I bought a couple of weeks ago? Here’s what it looks like now. Yikes. First off: slapped wrist that not all of it is labeled. Oops. Also, I’m going to have to assign sequential tape numbers… but hey, that’s what spine labels are for, right? The good news is that most of these tapes only have five to ten minutes’ material on them… the bad news is that about five of them are genuinely full. Mind you, DVCAM – they fill up at 40 minutes, so it could be worse. The statistics so far, including the pilot from a few months ago, are:

  • Tapes used: 41
  • Films shot by students: 17 (±1)
  • Films shot by @Bristol staff: 1
  • Films shot by Glasgow Science Centre staff: 2
  • Films shot by me: 8

I’m going to cart all the gear to the BIG Event in Manchester next week, so hopefully we’ll break past 30 films. I doubt I’ll manage to get them all edited before we run out of days for this stage of the project, but nevertheless – there’s enough material here to do an update a week for half a year.

Now, not all of it is great. In particular, the shoe plates haven’t arrived for my tripods yet, so there’s lots of wobbly handheld, with the emphasis on the ‘wobbly’ rather than the ‘held,’ but a few of the films are absolute gems. The wild west Coke/Pepsi fizz-off, for example, will make your day when you finally see it.

I’ll post much more about how fab the workshops were, and how wonderful and creative and hard-working and sincere the kids were, and all that. For now: we had a blast, and there’s some cracking stuff in that pile of tapes.

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