MAKING THE WATCH
by Norman Bull

I am pleased to say we have successfully completed a club film this year, albeit only five minutes long, but it's another one for the archives. This was a modest little project was to inject a little humorous variety into a programme of films entered for the Triangle Competition. THE WATCH is a remake of a little sketch made out of a gag regaled by Fred Gelder and hurriedly cobbled together during one of our earlier summer meetings.
A Sunday morning during early April was set aside and a small group made-up of Fred Gelder, Diggy, Eve, John & Barbara Gollop, and myself, and closely supported and fortified with cups of tea and coffee by my wife Sylvia, gathered in the small confines of our house extension. A false fireplace and wall mounted picture and furniture were removed and pushed aside to establish a plain wall backdrop which would represent part of the concourse of Gatwick airport international terminal building.
By now this (world famous) backdrop has represented a futuristic BBC Channel 7 studio, a senatorial office in Minneapolis and PROJECT ZENITH headquarters in Geneva, in a previous production.
In this tiny space, Fred and Diggy acted out their parts as travel weary passengers tagging on the end of a queue at passport control headed by Eve, Barbara and John. All the time we were hopeful that the sound of children playing, a dog barking and passing traffic would not feature too prominently on the sound track. An improvised dialogue which was not too tightly scripted was utilised to make it easier and hopefully more natural sounding by our star studded cast.
By the end of the morning all the action, dialogue and close-up work had been shot and we sat for a short break with packed lunches and to discuss the next phase.
Location two was to be the airport car park. My choice of the stand-in was a large car park behind the shops at Worcester Park high street.
It wasn't really anything like an airport car park but I thought with some carefully framed compositions we might get away with it.
In any case, I thought, there wouldn't be too many people around on a Sunday afternoon to witness a bunch of nut cases cavorting about in front of a video camera.
After lunch the equipment and entourage was gathered and loaded up into the three vehicle cavalcade which made up the WINNING POST outside production unit, and made off for the second location.
I was right; the car park was virtually deserted apart from the odd vehicle and person loading up their car boot.
Fortunately this small amount of activity could be caught in frame to inject a little life into the shot. Sometimes though, shooting had to cease as the crash of the bottles being thrown into the portable bottle bank reverberated through the air. At one point, and I still have to smile when I look at the unedited footage, Fred had to run towards the camera, suitcases in hand. This was repeated over and over again until it satisfied the perfectionist whim of the sadistic cameraman, (me).
Filming ended at about the middle of the afternoon when we departed our different ways to enjoy what little there was left of the weekend.
All this was shot in SVHS at that time, as I was the only one of the group with high band equipment, the editing fell to me.

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