Another one crossed-off

I went to see the penultimate edit of my little film yesterday, and I think it is going to be quite charming. I will be modestly splashing it all around the interweb including here, so you need not fret about missing it. I may even ask Mr Gray for a review - marks out of ten and all that.

It centres around the beloved Bell Inn and I think it may be the only bit of film taken there in the last twenty years that does not feature me sitting at the bar with a pint of beer in front of me, because I was behind the cameras. A few years ago, my German friends were watching a TV travel program which featured England generally and Bath in particular. Then came a little clip of the inside of the pub - which they have frequented many times during their trips here - and there was I, sitting at the bar with a pint of beer in front of me. I could not even remember a film crew being there, but that is not surprising.

My film - as already mentioned - is a promotional video for both the pub and the musicians who feature in it. The main man of the band (I might as well name him: Andrew Cresswell Davis) no longer drinks alcohol, but still goes in there almost every evening to drink coffee. It is everyone's social hub, you see. The tee-totalers who frequent it do not stay long, and I understand why. It is not an edifying sight to soberly watch everyone else getting shit-faced, and there are only so many coffees you can drink in one night.

I was speaking about the video to a friend who already thinks that I believe I can do anything, and he said, "Oh. So you have turned into a film director now have you?" I explained that all I did was to come up with the idea, then get everyone else to cobble it into something worth watching.

All through my life, if I have seen something which impresses me I long to get involved in the process, if only once. Drone photography is now used everywhere in TV and film, but when I first saw it some years ago, I was gobsmacked. How did they do that?

Video-mapping is not so widely used, mainly because it is so bloody expensive. Even my three-minute Bell feature (www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDTacFNEi68) cost about £7000, but it was only as cheap as that because there was a lot of unpaid work done on it, especially by me.

It is all to do with crossing things off wish-lists and not much to do with a desire to be an aging film-director. I gave that ambition up in my twenties.

Watch this space.