NOW we had a 600-foot reel of film and a projector that was limited to 400-foot reels. So we cut the film in half, and showed it.
The first reel seemed OK, but for most of the second reel, the sound stripe showed on the picture. Next morning I set to work with a razor blade and managed to get it all off, but I made quite a few scratches on the film in the process and had to start on the editing and splicing game all over again.
It was at this point that the lamp in the editing machine decided to give up the ghost.
Leaving the re-striping until I had help, I decided to put the sound effects on the first reel. In theory, with this projector, one could stop and start recording at will, but it wasn’t quite like that in practice.
The ‘start’ produced only a faint click, but the ‘stop’ produced a noise like bagpipes. This meant that any mistake would mean complete re–recording from there to the end of the reel. The thought of having to do the whole thing twice gave me the jitters and I made a mistake.
It was only a three-second mistake but, when the script calls for a lion roaring, you can’t make do with a bullfrog with laryngitis.
In the event, it didn’t matter. The whole thing was going to have to be done again anyway because, during rewinding, fifty feet of sound stripe fell off.
We cut out the fifty feet of stripe-less film and tacked it on to the bits of the second reel which needed restriping. Amazingly, the restriping went perfectly and we spliced the first reel back together. Trying to do the same for the second reel, we found that we had missed about thirty feet of film which should have been striped. We thought about editing it out of the script altogether, but it was the scene with the fighting hippo.
Generally speaking, only weekday mornings, when Karen was at nursery school, could be used for recording. It was now Friday night, with the deadline rapidly approaching and no hope of progress before Monday, I arranged for her to go and play with a friend on Saturday, but we had been adopted by a tabby kitten two days earlier and having a cat in the house was such a novelty that she refused to go.
To make matters worse, the cat seemed to think that 8 mm film was created entirely for the enjoyment of cats.
In the afternoon, I tried to re-do the recording of the sound effects for part one. All went well until, bang in the middle, the projector felt hungry and ate three feet of film. I spliced together the two ends, removed the shredded middle from the machine and prepared to start all over again. Then the projector went on strike.
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