A PHOTOGRAPHIC safari is fun. It’s when you get home that the hard work starts. The editing and splicing, the title sequences, the sound effects and the commentary – that’s what takes the time. But if you’re going to make movies, you might as well try to make good movies.
We had come a long way since the days of random wobblings of the cheap cine, but we had no yardstick by which to measure our progress.
We still lacked one important thing – professional criticism. To get that, we were going to have to enter one of our films in an international competition and see what happened.
When the notice of the Canadian film festival arrived, ‘In Search of the Hippocrocoduck’ required only titles and sound track for completion. The titles, proclaiming that the film had been ‘directed by a thirst for adventure and cold beer’ and ‘produced by accident’, had already been filmed and sent for processing.
We had the striping machine, the sound stripe and the glue. Time was too short for us to send the film to America for striping, so we were going to have to do it ourselves.
There was quite a bit of work to be done, but six weeks seemed more than enough time in which to do it. So we paid our fees, posted our entry forms and got down to work.
Obviously nothing much could be done until the titles came back from Kodak. They duly arrived, but we found that the camera support had slipped during filming, and the whole lot were lop–sided. The static sequences were not too difficult to refilm, but the animations had to be done again from scratch.
While we were waiting for the film to be processed, we edited the sound effects, putting all the lion noises on one tape, all the hyena on another, and so on. Operating three tape recorders and a four-channel sound mixer is quite a simple job, if you happen to be an octopus.
My contortions would have been more in place in a circus.
At least there was one tape which would need no editing. The African music had been recorded logically – drums on one side of the tape, marimbas on the other. We played it through to check and found that someone had erased the marimbas.
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