Telecine Guy

Unseen Hitler footage from 1932

2010-10-16T14:02:00.009+01:00

I spend most of my time transferring peoples home movies and video tapes to DVD but occasionally something special turns up!

One morning a gentleman called and said he needed a 16mm film put on to DVD urgently... today ...now! I said no problem bring it round.

He arrived with the film... not on a reel... as a pancake! (un-spooled coiled film) First job, put it on a reel... not easy as I don't have facilities for film pancakes. If you let the thing slip and it unreels... big trouble! Fortunately it was a short film, I carefully removed the center plug, placed my finger through the hole and, wearing my white gloves, attached the end of the film to the take up spool on the projector.

Now being told this was a very precious film, I was NOT going to use the projector motor... I wound it on by hand. After about 15 minutes of winding it was done, on the reel ready to show! It was footage shot by the gentleman's father in 1932 on a plane with Mr. Adolph Hitler, and sitting behind him eating a hard-boiled egg was Joseph Goebbels, also on-board was Hitler's entourage and bodyguards. This amazing material, never seen before, is on its way to the Imperial War Museum.

The early years

2009-05-17T14:08:00.002+01:00

In the 70's when the first portable video machines became available I made a couple of promos for local groups. There were no editing devices at that time, so I had to edit in camera. To show the finished result I had to let the group take the portable, complete with a small monitor, around to promote themselves. People were very impressed with the concept, even if they didn't like the group. It did however get one group a recording contract, The Martels. They released one record." Time to say Goodnight". Later, when colour machines arrived and editing was possible I shot groups and bands with 2 cameras. One camera would shoot a wide shot and the other get all the close ups. I then laid down the wide shots and inserted the close ups.
The hardest and most challenging edit I had to do was when someone brought me a video they had shot of a band. They had shot the band on video and recorded the sound on a reel to reel machine but... the video was silent no guide track!. I had to lay the sound on to a video tape, put the pictures on a master tape and then, by watching very closely the vocalists, match up the sound...not easy.
Moving on to the 90'S, when editing became more sophisticated, I worked with a company that shot a lot of music concerts in Brunei, Elton John, Bobby Brown, Bryan Adams, James Ingram and many others. We would shoot with up to 8 portable cameras and the sound was recorded on a multi channel mixing desk. It would then take me a week or two to edit. All the cameras had sound, just recorded with the camera microphone, as a guide track. I had a 4 machine edit suite, recorder and 3 playback machines. I would take the tapes from the 3 most important cameras, sync them up and take their best shots then work my way through all the other cameras. When I was happy with the result my master tape went to the sound man who married it up with his final multi channel mix.
If we do something like that today editing is so much easier with non linear! Load everything into the computer, lay all the material onto the time lines and away you go.

Bowled Over

2008-11-21T11:30:00.003Z

In 1965 I went with a tenpin bowling team to a tournament in Paris. We hadn't been bowling very long so we didn't do very well but we saw some great teams performing!... all captured on 8mm film... silent of course.

About that time I had written and recorded a bowling song 'Lets go Bowling'. I've since transferred the film to Video and edited it to the record. I started with 9.5mm film in the 50's, the only other option was 16mm, very expensive! Then came 8mm, 16mm split down the middle, 50ft reels, you put the film through once, turned it over and ran it through again, problem was turning it over without letting in the light! When it came back from the processors there was usually a blank bit in the middle where you turned it over. I made several attempts to get sound with my films, the first being a projector with a device on the side to sync an audio recorder! You threaded the audio tape through the wheels and it would regulate the projector. I tried and tried this without success, the audio tape just kept running off the wheels. Much cursing and blaming the equipment, what a load of rubbish.

On reading the instruction more carefully, always a good idea, I realized the audio recorder I had was running at the wrong speed. I think the correct speed was 3.75 and mine was 7.5. My next attempt was sometime later with a device that allowed you to glue a thin recording stripe down the side of the film and with a sound projector, record your sound track!As you can imagine the stripe was very thin and very tricky to put on the film. I must say I had limited success, when the stripe went on OK I was able to put commentary and music on but... the music was a bit suspect, a lot of wow and flutter, the voice was passable. The big let down was the fact that after a while the stripe came of in places! I did try several times but finally gave up, it was too much.The only successful film with a sound track that I made was a trip to Florida using a Super 8 sound camera. That was the last time I used a film camera.

Since I moved into filming and editing on tape I have seen enormous progress in the equipment available... I'll save that for my next Blog... and I'll post that bowling film on my web site... fade to black.

www.telecineguy.com

New tricks for old dogs

2008-11-10T23:50:00.002Z

Welcome to my first Blog. I've been toying with the idea of blogging for some time and now I've finally done it with a subject that I really enjoy, and hopefully my articles will have something to offer you.

Now that my new Telecine Guy web site is up and running, I can devote some time to getting some of my cine tales and information from the last 40 years into this space for the like-minded to enjoy.

So that's the first Blog entry completed. I'll be back soon with a real article.

Telecine Guy
www.telecineguy.com