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Anies filming on site with his mini video camera. He is filming footage for the second episode of the series.

OK… so yesterday we “released” the first of a series of short films that we intend to make during the excavations here. I just wanted to make a few comments about it before the next one, which should be ready in a week or two.

First off, this is the first time I have attempted to make a short film, except for something I did last summer which doesn’t really count (I can put that up on the web at some point if anyone is interested). It was pretty fun to put together although there were some things I wanted to do in it which I didn’t have the know-how to do. Also, the software (iMovie) I used seems to be a bit limited but easy to use. I will try and use a more advanced software later. For instance, I wanted to do more cut-aways while Guy was talking. Looking at a “talking Head” can be pretty boring at the best of times and if we want some of the younger members of the public to see this I doubt their MTV attention spans could deal with such little visual stimulation. There is a bit of a learning curve for me here and hopefully the episodes will become better as the excavation continues and I may go back and re-edit this episode at a later date.

One comment that someone made is that it looks like we spend a lot of time just standing around. I guess this is true but this can be an aspect of archaeology especially when you’re trying to work out what is going on. The next episode will show more footage of people doing some actual, physical work.

It’s actually quite hard to find the time on site to film people as I do have other duties and quite a tight deadline… as usual in contract archaeology. So this is a bit of a side-line but I think it’s quite a valuable thing to do as part of the archive. There aren’t many other sites, in contract archaeology, that would give the time and support to do something like this so I’ll try and get off my backside and produce a few more.

OK.. enough of my witterings… I have to get back to site…