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ARTHUR GODDARD DVD NEWSLETTER 1The latest news of the Arthur Goddard DVD, being prepared to celebrate the 2010 visit to the UK of the last-surviving member of the management team who designed, built and developed the Land-Rover in 1947-48. |
... a progress report (of sorts!)
To start, thanks very much to all of you who've expressed an interest in the DVD, and are looking forward to it coming out. So am I! But if this Newsletter sounds like a catalogue of disasters (or feeble whingeing excuses), then please bear with me.
Let's start on a positive note — I have a project box on my shelf containing 16 tapes of superb material. In particular, the star of the whole fortnight, Arthur himself, was magnificent. As the hectic days progressed, he seemed to get younger and younger, and even more enthusiastic for what was going on. He was patience personified with me and my camera, always flitting around, barging in, and asking questions (me, not him!) He was even very understanding (although unable afterwards to resist taking the opportunity to tease) when we had an unfortunate episode with a vital-but-not-switched-on radio mic!
But having 16 tapes of superb material doesn't mean that a finished video comes along automatically 3 weeks later — in fact, the opposite, as there's so much to be considered. The first thing to do is to transcribe it all... 10 hours of material. It takes a long time, and I always start to wonder if it's worth it. But it is, if only because without a paper hard copy it's impossible to remember where all the good bits were, and who said what, and how. Transcribing the first tape, I was amazed to find what we'd covered back on Day 1 — it had all faded from memory.
Throughout all of this, there's other work to be considered. The Arthur Goddard DVD is essentially a 'free-time-project', to be worked on as and when I can find the opportunity. A lot of other commitments came to fruition during May and June — in fact, the transcription of the interviews from the Chesford Grange Hotel was done in the back of a client's Ford Galaxy on the M5, travelling down to a safety induction shoot in Plymouth. And always there was the threat of the big interview that James Taylor did with Arthur in the boardroom at Gaydon — well over an hour was recorded. In the end I had to admit defeat, and send it to a professional transcriber to break the back of it. Even then I had to go through it again afterwards to make sure all the specialist Land-Rover stuff was correct.
But at last it's all done, and as I type this the pages are being printed so I can sit down in front of an autumn fire and remind myself of it all, and sort it into some form of cohesive order. The opening was written 2 months ago... but not filmed yet. I have the new mini camera to help me to do it — it'll be from inside my wife's Series 1 Land-Rover — but will leave that until I have all the script finalised.
All it needs is for the computers to be ready for the edit. Oh dear — they've been fighting me. Back in April, and knowing that this project was on the horizon, I decided to upgrade my whole editing process. There was a superb limited- time offer to invest in the top-of-the-range professional editing system — the one they used to make 'Avatar'! I would get it, do a few minor projects to get the hang of it, and then set to work on Arthur's material. I would keep my old, obsolete system for the legacy projects I have on it (like 'First Overland'), but would quickly transfer to the new outfit. Would that that had been the case...!
How best to describe the problem? Let's say that my old system is a bit like a Series 1 — basic, and a bit clunky. Nothing flash, but capable up to its limits. The new system is like a Discovery 4 — years of experience and refinement combining together to produce a machine that's arguably the best off-road vehicle in the world. And there the analogy breaks down... driving a Discovery from A to B is easy enough, but to find out all that it can do you need to read the manual over and over. And if anything goes wrong, you need a degree in vehicle electronics just to diagnose what it is... and an IBM mainframe to put it right. The Series 1, on the other hand, just chugs on, requiring minimal knowledge, and a handful of Whitworth spanners.
I really have tried to get my head round the new system. It's incredible what it will do... or so I understand. I'm finding it very difficult to make it do even the simple stuff — I put in a dissolve between two scenes in a test project, and then changed my mind. But I couldn't find any way of removing that dissolve... in the old system you would just click on it and press 'Delete'. In the new system I can find no 'Delete' of any kind. and many, many little things like that, which are just second nature with the old machine. I took the new mini camera into the wood when I was walking Meg, to familiarise myself with it. The resulting edit of a 2½-minute film would have taken me half an hour max on the old system — it took nearly 2 days with the new. All the information I need is in the (2-inch-thick) manuals... but it's written in 'manualese', so is not a great deal of help when all you want to know is how to delete a dissolve.
I will eventually get the hang of it, but the Arthur Goddard DVD won't wait that long... any more than you will! So at the weekend I made the decision to forget the new system, and compile it in the old, where I'm speedy and fluent. It may not have the smooth bells and whistles of 'Avatar' (and certainly won't be in 3D!), but it will be plain, and rugged, and perfectly capable of telling the story. Pretty much like Arthur's 1948 creation, actually!
But the machine that hosts the old system has blown its head gasket, and won't be repaired until October 6th at the earliest. I'll spare you the details — this Newsletter has gone on long enough anyway — but will stoke up the fire and start nailing those transcripts together. Thanks for your patience — as a reward, here's a little snip from Day 1, that might not make it into the finished DVD. It's from Arthur's first visit to the Heritage Motor Museum at Gaydon, and it's the moment when he's introduced by Alex Massey and Mike Bishop to something a million miles from the Centre Steer — the Range Stormer concept vehicle.
Click on the picture to view (28MB)
[You may need to enable pop-ups to see this video]
GRAEME ALDOUS
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