Report on Luton Movie Makers for IAC NTR Newsletter July/August 2007
  
Luton Movie Makers had their AGM on 26 April 2007 and, after the usual 
agenda, got round to discussing future activities. The topics covered 
were:- 
(a) The possible rental of a premises where we could have permanently 
mounted blue screen facilities. Currently we spend a lot of time 
setting up and taking down the screen and lighting every time we need 
to do blue screen. 
(b) Daytime meetings, mainly for those who do shift work or cannot 
get to the evening meeting because of other commitments. Also, among 
this group, there was interest in having a series of introductory 
workshops in movie making. We have since started doing this and have 
covered "Planning and Scripts" and "Principles of Video Editing". 
Some members wanted to cover Digital Video Editing but the difficulty 
there is that the members use several different software packages for 
this and it is not practical to do courses in all of them. Covering 
the "principles" seemed to be a good compromise and is useful to those 
who do not have any software. We are happy to make this material 
available to other clubs.
(c) New equipment. Suggestions included getting a DVD Duplicator and 
DVD Printer for producing DVDs in bulk. We are now producing large
quantities of films for festivals and copies of archive footage for 
participants at events we have filmed. It was also proposed that we 
buy an Upscaling DVD / VHS player and recorder which would let us view 
DVDs at High Definition quality and possibly upscale existing DV tapes 
to near HDV. It would also allow us to provide a good quality 
VHS-tape-to-DVD reproduction service for members. 
(d) One member proposed a Luton Heritage Filming activity. For this we 
would need to get a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to interview 
and film people in Luton to help preserve its heritage. It was 
suggested that we could all start by filming our elderly relatives who 
have lived in Luton. 
(e) Another member proposed that the club buy a licence for Special 
Effects. They cost £180 for 1000 effects and come on 13 DVDs. There 
is also another set called FX Home which cost £90. 
From this list, which is in addition to our current activities, it can 
be seen that we are going to be very busy this year.