naw kans baner (nine hundred flags - 2000)
This was the second ever film I edited on a computer. (The first, Wilf Hughes at Crofty, doesn't seem to be available to me any more, but if I find it I'll put it on here.)
The film was shot in the summer of 1999 and documents the end of the march from Bodmin to Exeter to commemorate the Prayerbook War in 1549. It was the Cornish-language entry for the Celtic Film Festival in Truro in 2000. It was a great day for me. After the events pictured here we went to the park in Gandy Street for pasties and a performance of Bells Ring Backwards, the guise play Cornwall Theatre Festival commissioned from me to celebrate the march. Then we all got coaches home and while I was waiting for a bus in Truro I wrote the first draft of The Black Sea. |
Some technical things because they interest me at least: Naw Kans Baner was shot on Hi8 video (so spot the drop-out) using a Sony TR2000 domestic camera, and the sound on the film was carefully reconstructed from whatever the camera mic picked up. I edited in the long-dead Media Studio Pro software (which was very good, in my opinion better than Adobe Premiere at the time) on a home PC with a FAST a/v card. That was very ambitious in those days, and the computer would repeatedly crash and smelled as though it was perpetually about to burst into flames. I've remastered the film into 720p (the original resolution was 400 lines, so well done Adobe Media Encoder, especially as this version was ripped from a DVD) and widescreen.