Tag Archives: video

Whatever Happened to the DVD?

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I still have a DVD collection. Not a particularly impressive one and certainly not one that would make me a fortune on Antiques Roadshow in thirty years’ time but there’s something I like about having a shelf full of films I can actually hold in my hand. These days, of course, you can watch pretty much anything without owning a physical copy. When there are so many new TV channels around and everything can either be downloaded, streamed or watched on catch-up TV, what is even the point of a DVD? They just take up room, fill up cupboards and shelves and generally get in the way.

To a certain extent I sort of agree with that, for instance, if you miss a film on the BBC, you can always go to BBC iPlayer and watch it there. On the other hand, I read somewhere on the internet that DVDs are making a comeback.

Sometimes, when there is absolutely nothing on TV worth watching, I’ll have a scan through my DVD shelf and choose something to watch. These days I get bored pretty easily, so I might watch an hour of something, go to make a cup of tea and find that something interesting has popped up — a documentary or an old TV show — and I’ll save the DVD for later (my DVD player actually remembers where you stopped the disc). Then I’ll settle down with my cuppa, watch the old TV show and finish the DVD later.

Interestingly, last night that exact situation occurred. I was watching an old favourite, the Errol Flynn version of Robin Hood, paused the disc to make a cuppa and up popped that old TV show, Man in a Suitcase. (I had set a reminder for it earlier after a quick browse through the on-screen TV guide).

Man in a Suitcase was a series made by Lew Grade’s ITC production company. It’s about a former CIA agent called McGill who was either sacked or forced to resign from the CIA and now makes his living as a private investigator in the UK. Presumably there is an episode that explains all this but I’m not sure I ever remember seeing it. Richard Bradford played McGill in a brooding, laid-back James Dean sort of style.

I had really been looking forward to watching Man in a Suitcase but after about twenty minutes — or probably less — I realised it wasn’t my cup of tea and went back to my film.

Some time ago I was looking up at my Woody Allen DVD collection of about twelve discs and thought I really needed to pick up some of his other films. Sleeper is a great comedy about Miles Monroe, played by Woody of course, a health-food store owner who gets cryogenically frozen in 1973 and wakes up two hundred years in the future. I searched eBay for a copy and found one, although the cheapest was just under £6. A number of Woody Allen DVD bundles came up for a similar price but sadly none of them had Sleeper. Anyway, for £5.20 I bought a collection of five of Woody’s films. Two I already had: the wonderful Manhattan and Bananas, although my copy of the latter was one of those free newspaper DVD versions, so it was good to get a “proper” copy with all the correct packaging. (Yes, I know, I’m a bit weird like that).

I put the first DVD in and got it set up ready to go. Then I sorted out a cup of tea with the mandatory ham sandwich and chocolate digestive and I was ready to press play. After about twenty minutes of Love and Death I was a little underwhelmed and thought, OK, I’ll save that for another day. In went Zelig, which is a sort of spoof documentary. Again, it wasn’t great but I managed to watch it right through to the end. The best thing about it was the way they made a lot of new footage actually look like real documentary film from the 1930s or 40s, whichever decade it was supposed to be set in. Great visual quality Woody, but Zelig was a little lacking in content.

Time for another cuppa and in goes Shadows and Fog. I gave that one fifteen minutes but it wasn’t doing it for me, so it was out with that one and in went Bananas. Just then though, a documentary series popped up on the Yesterday channel: Canal Boat Diaries. It’s a diary of a young man, Robbie Cummings, who journeys along the UK’s canals in his narrowboat. It’s largely self-filmed, although I suspect that at various points he is joined by another cameraman and a drone pilot, because various shots are incorporated from overhead and of him tootling off into the distance on his boat. I may be wrong and perhaps after that last shot he then had to reverse back, pick up his camera and tripod and start off again. When I used to make little YouTube films about our motorhome trips to France, I found myself doing similar things. It can be a little frustrating but sometimes you just need that shot.

Nothing much happens in Canal Boat Diaries but it’s a glimpse of a gentle, relaxing existence, chugging along at 4 mph through various towns. Robbie parks up here and there, makes dinner on his little stove and stops to stock up on supplies and to fuel up, as well as to explore. A few years ago, Liz and I looked at hiring a narrowboat for a weekend but the costs were really shocking. Perhaps we’ll have to try again later in the year when the holiday season has finished and things get (hopefully) cheaper.

Back to Bananas, which is one of my favourite Woody Allen films and it’s a long while since I’ve seen it. The film opens with the shooting of the President of San Marcos, shown as if it were a sporting event, with actual American TV sports commentator Howard Cosell presenting the action. Woody plays Fielding Mellish, who is a product tester and in one of the first sequences he is testing an office set-up with built-in exercise items. It’s actually a lot of fun but later he opens the door to a market researcher played by Louise Lasser, in real life Woody’s former wife. Woody later travels to San Marcos to impress her. Sylvester Stallone makes his film debut as a thug who Woody encounters on an underground train.

I love Bananas, especially the end where Howard Cosell commentates on Woody and Louise’s wedding night. One thing I found disappointing though, is that there are never any extras on a Woody Allen DVD. No interesting ‘making-of’ documentaries or commentary tracks by Woody, which I think are always an interesting addition to a DVD.

If I were to rewind a few years, I used to spend a lot of time in Manchester city centre, browsing music shops for CDs and DVDs. My favourite store was the huge HMV in Manchester city centre. They used to have an in-store DJ who was a really friendly girl, very approachable and very into her music. I always used to go and chat to her and she recommended all sorts of albums to me.

After looking through the CDs I’d pop up to the DVD section and spend more time there. I remember going in one day to find the in-store DJ had been replaced by a radio version: someone, presumably at head office in London, who was broadcasting music to all the HMV stores. Later, in 2013, the store closed down completely after more than twenty years on the same site. Browsing records and videos in HMV and then popping into my favourite bookshops before settling down in some back-street pub for a drink — ah, those were the days. I probably bought the larger part of my Woody Allen DVD collection there. Or was it eBay? Certainly the buying power of the internet may well have played a part in HMV’s demise.

Anyway, where will I find a copy of Sleeper? Ah well, back to eBay again.

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The World of AI Video

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I did a post some time ago called Manipulating the Image. It was all about photo manipulation and how they used to do it in the old days when cameras used film and not a memory card and how they do it today using artificial intelligence. Things have quickly moved on and now it is just as easy to make a short video with AI as it is to make an image.

My go to AI imaging site has until recently been nightcafe.com. Users can easily make images there as well as short video clips and you can even use an image as a starting point. Nightcafe requires a subscription for a small sum but also, if you use the site regularly, you can build up a raft of free credits with which to make even more images. I soon found that my image credits were soaring so as a fully paid-up member of Tightwads Anonymous I thought wait a minute, I might as well cancel my subscription as I don’t need it anymore as I have a shed load of free credits.

So, I cancelled my subscription and soon realised that I was now no longer a ‘pro’ user and as such no longer entitled to use the top AI models. I still had lots of credits but I could only use them on the less powerful models. Not only that, I could no longer make my images into videos.

You might be thinking that perhaps that wasn’t such a big deal for a writer. After all, a writer deals with words not pictures. Yes, that’s true but in the 21st century world of the internet, it’s images that bring people into your orbit. A Twitter or Facebook post with a picture or video will apparently get 120% more engagement than a plain old text post, so in order to bring people into the clutches of stevehigginslive.com, I need pictures or videos.

A lot of my posts over on Twitter are basically promotions for the blogs on this website. I try to produce an interesting image to pull in my readers and then add a message; things like Read A New Blog Post or something similar. Here is one of my first video clips made using AI.

I’ve always rather liked this image below, an inviting pub with the name on a sign: The Blog Post Inn.

Here’s the same image made into a video over on meta.ai.

Many years ago as a schoolboy, one of my favourite doodles was to draw a frogman swimming underwater with a big flow of bubbles rising up to the surface. I was probably inspired by the TV in the 1960s, things like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in which Admiral Nelson and Captain Crane took us on all sorts of underwater adventures in their submarine, Seaview. Anyway, that was probably the source of some more videos involving a scuba diver finding an underwater carving which says -wait for it- Read a New Blog Post!

I always enjoyed both Voyage and another undersea TV show Stingray. Stingray was one of Gerry Anderson’s puppet shows. It was about the WASPs; the World Aquanaut Security Patrol and their amazing submarine Stingray commanded by Captain Troy Tempest. No doubt inspired by the scenes of Stingray and Seaview I decided, and this brings us back to AI, to make some submarine images. Here are a few below.

The really annoying thing about making AI images and videos is that they rarely come out how you want them. If they do, then they always seem to go wildly wrong when I try to tweak them. How do you make an AI image in the first place you might be asking. Well, simply from a text instruction, for instance:

A wide-angle view from low down; a moon rocket launches from Cape Kennedy. As the rocket blasts off in a cloud of smoke and steam, we see the words stamped vertically on the rocket: “NEW BLOG POST ” .

It’s always good to add in a few descriptive terms like hyper realistic as well as some camera terms like wide angle lens and so on.

In my video editor I’ve quite a few saved templates so it was easy to slot in the rocket video, add some sound effects from my trusty sound effects CD and here’s the finished video.

There are some pretty good AI generators out there that are completely free. Meta is the company that owns Facebook and you can use their app meta.ai to make free images and videos. I tend to start with an image from elsewhere, perhaps create something on Nightcafe and then upload it to meta and ask it to animate the image. I’ve had some good results and also some frustrating ones. I made an image of a woman wearing sunglasses with a neon sign saying ‘read a new blog post’ reflected in her specs. I asked meta to create a video from the image in which the girl ‘lifts up the specs, winks at the camera and replaces the specs’. Simple? No not really. In one version the woman took the specs off but then they disappeared. In another, they took themselves off and in a third they went up and down by themselves. Would she drop the specs slightly, wink and then put them back on? No. In the best result, the girl takes off the specs but seems to wink both eyes!  Not exactly what I wanted.

Another site, perhaps more well known is Grok which you can find on the former Twitter site, X.

Another new dimension to AI is audio and on some AI sites you can get an audio model to read a short script. I tend to put various elements together, pictures, video and audio, edit them in the traditional way and add either sound effects or music. I particularly like an audio model I found of an American man with a deep baritone voice which I use on a lot of my promo videos or sometimes an American lady. On Grok, you can actually produce a video in which your video subjects can speak but they tend to rattle off the dialogue so quickly it isn’t natural, although after some experimentation you can add pauses in places but even so, it comes over as a little odd.

Here’s one in which I asked the AI model to say ‘wow’ and then matched up some audio of my American AI voice saying that same word.

Going back to that earlier idea of the girl with the glasses, I thought I’d try again without the wink. The girl was supposed to look over her specs, smile and put them back. In the resulting clip the girl did all that but seemed to be mouthing ‘Hi’. I went off to my audio program on Freepik and produced some new audio, fitted them together and this was the result.

Whether these little clips bring in any new readers I’m not sure. In fact, now I think about it, it might put readers off if they assume the entire site is AI produced, including the writing! Of course, that would save me toiling away over a hot laptap trying to think up new ideas for blog posts.

Even so, I have a lot of fun messing about with AI images and audio. I wonder if perhaps one day I could even make an entire film using AI generated visuals and audio. Things are happening so quickly in the world of AI I can image that happening in the very near future.

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Not Responding

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’m still coming down to earth after five weeks in sunny and warm Lanzarote. OK, we’ve had a few warm days but mostly the weather has been wet and windy and cold.

I retired in 2022 so I don’t have to get off to work every day and, unlike many bloggers and amateur writers, I don’t have to struggle for writing time. Even so, my motivation to get up and write next week’s blog post has been a little deflated by the bad weather. Still, in a few days we will be in April my favourite time of the year. The days are getting longer and warmer and soon Liz and I will be off to France in our small motorhome.

Back in December I decided to save a little money by declaring the van off road and getting a rebate on the road tax but now it’s time to get the MOT sorted and get the van ready for the road again.

I had the van running the other day and it started up ok but there was one little cloud on the horizon, the left rear tyre was flat. It was parked up against the wall so I had to struggle over with my pump and soon the tyre began to inflate but then I realised there was a definite hissing sound and air was escaping. OK, new tyre required for this year plus whatever the MOT throws up.

I mentioned last week how I was glad to finally get a new video ready for my YouTube channel but my big problem with video is that I just can’t leave them alone. The video was all finished and uploaded to YouTube but then, as usual, I decided to tweak it a little. A further issue was that after editing a video on my laptop I usually upload the clips to Animoto and mix another version on the Animoto online editing site but my subscription had run out so I couldn’t do the things I wanted to do. So, it was time to put video editing aside for a while and try and write a blog for this week.

Not much has happened to me lately so what could I write about? My visit to the cinema? No, I mentioned that last week. Some more reflections on Lanzarote? No, I reckon we’ve had enough of that too. Restaurant visits? As usual I’ve had a few of those, after all, dining out is one of life’s great pleasures but then again, that’s another subject I’ve written about.

Putting blog posts on hold for a moment I decided to dig out an old poem I’ve always rather liked, give it a little makeover and make a new poetry video. I made it from scratch on my laptop, just with me reading the poem to camera. What I’ve always found when I record a ‘piece to camera’, as the professionals call it, is that my first attempt, take 1, will always be the best. Later by take 5 I find that I’ve completely lost the plot and I’m mixing all my words up, especially the bits at the end which are so easy I don’t even bother to write down. Things like, Thanks for watching, if you’d like to read more of my poetry look out for this new anthology, A Warrior of Words, available from Amazon.

That came out on take 5 as Thanks for watching my new anthology. If you’d like to er . . Take 6: Thanks for watching Amazon, go to Amazon to read er . . Take 7: Thanks for reading more of er Amazon . . It reminded me of the time when Marilyn Monroe had to do a scene on Some Like it Hot in which all she had to say was, ‘it’s me, sugar.’ The scene took 47 takes to complete!

Time for a break but later I did manage to put together a reasonable sort of video.

Later it was back to trying to knock out this week’s post. Sometimes when I’ve been really stuck, I’ll take an old post and either rewrite it or add to it. After trolling through lots of old blogs I thought the best thing to do was to just open up a blank page and start writing. I did that, wrote a couple of lines and realised that even though I was typing, nothing was happening. After a while a message came up on my screen saying Word is not responding. You don’t say, I thought.

Technology issues can be really frustrating and I’m sometimes rather tempted to resolve them by smashing my laptop to smithereens but I thought, no! The best thing to do, seeing as I had no idea what to write, was to go back and work on another video project. OK. I had a project which was fully edited once again on Animoto. As my subscription had expired, I couldn’t add a narration so it was time to download the result and narrate the voiceover on my laptop.

Download complete, I noticed that when I recorded the voiceover, the recording seemed to be jumping and missing out various words and then another message appeared: Video Editor is not responding! Aaagh! I clicked over to Google and searched for information about optimising sound recordings. I found that I had set my recordings to DVD quality and maybe my laptop just couldn’t cope with that. OK, time to reset to CD quality and finally that was another problem sorted. (I’m happy to report I resisted the temptation to just smash my laptop to smithereens again.)

I noticed then that when I had my narration on my computer screen and scrolled down as I read, the microphone was picking up the clicks on the scroll button. I couldn’t print off the narration as I had no ink in the printer so what I did was upload the narration to my OneDrive and open it up on my iPad and read it from there. On my iPad I was asked to log in to OneDrive. I did but they wanted further confirmation. They wanted a passcode entered which they sent to my mobile. Off I went in search of the mobile. I entered the passcode but I was too late. It had expired! I did it again but this time the password was wrong!

(Steve don’t do it. Don’t smash the iPad to smithereens!)

I was getting more than a little exasperated but I recorded the first section of the voiceover, paused, scrolled the text and recorded some more. Brilliant I thought but then that message popped up again: Video editor is not responding. OK, keep calm I thought, don’t smash the laptop to pieces. What could I do? Perhaps I’d used up too much memory so I took a load of video files and moved them to my portable hard drive. A quick reboot and a check of my C drive: delete my temporary files and finally things seemed to be working properly.

OK, final narration added, time for a few quick changes here and there and that was it. I like to leave the finished video for a few days then take another look and then any minor errors are much easier to see.

In the old days of editing video, the editor began at the beginning and just carried on adding the next clip and then the next and so on. Today, working in digital video, the approach is slightly different. A scene can be easily compiled into a rough cut but then the editor can go back and change clips earlier in the video, trimming a bit here or re-ordering things there. Another great thing about modern video editing is that you can save your project, so if at a later date you want to change something, you don’t have to start all over again. You just open up your saved project, change whatever you want and create a video file for the new version.

I’ve often thought about how wonderful it would be to be a professional video editor but then I always imagine myself at work and the boss comes in and says ’can you have that ready by this afternoon?’. I doubt if I would last long at that company when I handed in the finished product two weeks later.

One of my favourite video editing stories is about Charlie Chaplin. Over a hundred years ago in 1920, Chaplin had just completed his first major film as a director; The Kid. He was in the middle of a messy divorce from his first wife Mildred Harris and thinking she was about to seize the unreleased film, Chaplin smuggled the negative to Salt Lake City where he completed the edit in his hotel room. Despite this, The Kid was released to rave reviews and became the second highest grossing film of 1921.

I doubt whether Return to Stockport Bus Station will get a similar response but I do love messing about with video or as Liz tends to call it; twatting about on my laptop!

A little later I checked my emails and there was one tempting me to renew my Animoto subscription with a half price offer. As a fully paid up member of Northern Tightwads it just not in my psyche to ignore such an offer so I signed up for half price and went about making a new version of my latest video. That would be version 3 and by the way, everything worked fine and I didn’t smash my laptop into a thousand pieces.

OK, time to write that blog post. I opened up word and stared back at the few lines I had written but nothing in the way of inspiration seemed to be occurring. I was getting a new message but in my head rather than on my screen:

Brain not responding.

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A Slice of My Life 2024

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s a long time since I’ve made a video for my YouTube channel and recently I’ve been trying to think about what my next project should be. When I’m stuck for a video I tend to tweak or even remake some of the short videos I use on social media to promote this page and my two books. In fact my YouTube page is made up of quite a lot of videos like that as well as numerous short video versions of my poems. Every now and again I try and put something different together. I usually make a video about our yearly trips to France in our motorhome and I’ve made a few videos about Manchester, my home town and also the place where my book Floating in Space is set.

Liz and I have just spent 5 weeks in Lanzarote and although I took my video camera over there I actually didn’t use it except to take some holiday snaps.

Last week I decided to take a little jolly out on the bus over to Stockport and see how the new bus station, currently under construction there, was coming along. Travelling to Stockport on the bus made me think about how our lives change and move on. Back in 1979 I was a coach driver for National Express but I wasn’t happy with the job. In the summer of 79 I was 22 years old and far too young and immature to do such a responsible job. Covering the long distance National Express routes wasn’t too bad but private hires were difficult as the driver had to plan his routes and to be honest I didn’t know my way about the country particularly well.

After being stuck on the same long distance bus route from Manchester to Lowestoft far too many times I packed the job in. I went to ask for my old job back at GM Buses but they gave me a big lecture about how they were fed up of training drivers only for them to resign and go driving for other companies and so I was turned away. That same afternoon I drove over to the GM Bus depot at Stockport where they were short of staff and they started me the same day. For over ten years I spent every working day in Stockport taking fares and later, driving buses. Returning in 2024 after over 30 years away was interesting, I must say.

Most of Mersey Square, the square at the very centre of Stockport, was fenced off while the builders worked on the new bus station. A huge railway viaduct spans the centre of Stockport and the bus station or bus interchange as they are now calling it is mostly on one side of the viaduct with part of it spilling over onto the other side. Someone told me it was due to open in two weeks time but looking around, that seemed to be a pretty tall order.

I shot some video in the square then walked around the construction, filming as I went. I was planning to film myself with my trusty selfie stick and chat away to the camera about my memories of Stockport but as usual, I felt a little self-conscious and just stuck to filming the new construction. I couldn’t walk through the area as of course the builders were still working so I had to walk around it.

When I got to the other side a new Stagecoach bus went past on its way into the Stagecoach garage. It was displaying the route number 192 which is a very busy bus route indeed, going down the A6 from Hazel Grove into Stockport and then on into Manchester. Back in my day there was a 192 every six minutes and each one was packed. Looking back I must have spent an awful lot of time going up and down on that bus route.

When the bus services were deregulated in 1986 the Busy Bee bus company tried to muscle in onto our route and so the service moved up to one every three minutes! Yes we would load up in Piccadilly, Manchester. An inspector would count three minutes and then you were off. Straight away there was a set of traffic lights and if you hit those on red you were in trouble as the bus behind was already following you out.

I followed the Stagecoach bus round the corner to the old GM Buses depot, now of course owned and run by Stagecoach. Inside it was full of buses and for a moment I remembered the old days when it was full of the old orange and cream of GM Buses.

I left the bus company in the early 1990s and started my own company selling motorsport memorabilia. I loved that job and spent all my day chatting to various regular people about F1 and motorsport but sadly, I didn’t make a lot of money, eventually selling all my stock to someone who had a similar business. After a failed attempt to become a TV producer I ended up short of money and went back to GM Buses. I worked for the GM coaching company known as Charterplan. After a short while there I transferred to an office job in the GM Buses control room in Ardwick, Manchester and that was the last time I set foot in Stockport, until last week.

The Comfy GillI walked round to the other side of the bus depot and there opposite, what used to be the main exit for our buses, was the Comfortable Gill. The Comfy, as we affectionately called it, was the pub where we busmen used to drink after the day’s shift was over. At one time if a driver was due to finish after last orders at 11, the landlord used to accept telephone orders for a pint so sometimes we could pull in at 11:20, park the bus in the depot and then pop over to the Comfy to find a pint waiting for us to sup while we cashed up our day’s takings. When I saw it the other day the Comfy was all closed up and looked neglected. So many of Britain’s pubs have closed down and I walked away hoping that the Comfy might be saved in the near future.

It’s always interesting to look back and have a stroll down memory lane. I can’t say working at GM Buses was a great job and looking back I wonder why I stayed so long. Of course back then I had bought a house and I had a very expensive mortgage to pay and I put in a lot of hours to pay for it. Perhaps I would have been better served by prioritising my career rather than my house. Oh well!

Liz and I went to the pictures this week. It was the first time we had visited the cinema since seeing Oppenheimer last year and although I didn’t rate it as the work of genius many people seem to think it is, Oppenheimer was certainly an excellent film and deservedly won the best picture Oscar.

The film we went to see was Wicked Little Letters set in England after the first World War. It’s about an Irish lady who comes to live in an English village. She is outspoken, very rude and swears a lot and is soon branded as the author of a very nasty series of poison pen letters. It wasn’t a bad film but what was odd was the way the 1920s were portrayed. There was a black judge, a black Asian policewoman, numerous other black people and the Irish lady was living with a black man. It was if they had substituted 1920s life with today’s multicultural society. I’m not sure why they would do that but the end result was that the entire film looked a little bit strange. Why didn’t they just set the film in the present day when different ethnic groups, as well as bad language is just the norm? Or was the director trying to make some point about society that perhaps I have missed? Wicked Little Letters isn’t a bad film in fact it’s quite amusing in a way and was actually based on a true story but that cutural shift just didn’t work for me.

Perhaps we all look back at the past in different ways.

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Making The Video and Why I Didn’t Get In The Taxi

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Back in the nineteen nineties I was at a bit of a crossroads in my life. I’d split up with my girlfriend and had sold the lovely house that we owned jointly. I was stuck in a job that used to be so much fun but had now become a boring dead end job that I was fed up with. I was desperate to do something really exciting, something creative so after a failed attempt at running my own motor sport memorabilia business I decided to have a last ditch try at getting into TV by enrolling on a video production course in Manchester.

It was at a place called the WFA which, if I remember correctly, stood for the Workers Film Association. It was a rather left-wing place too as you can guess from the name, and certainly it wouldn’t have been a good idea to say you admired Mrs Thatcher!

To get a place on the course I had to give a presentation on a media subject. I chose working class representation in film and television and spoke about the kitchen sink movie dramas of the sixties and seventies, (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving, Alfie and so on) the TV soaps of the nineties (Coronation Street, Eastenders and Brookside) and how contemporary British movies were then, and now I suppose, very middle class, (Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill for example.)

On the very first day we had to introduce ourselves and explain why we were on the course. I gave a quick resumé of myself and my career, a re-hash of the above presentation and a quick mention of my film making heroes from Billy Wilder to Oliver Stone. I was somewhat surprised to say the least when the next candidate said he had just bought a video camera and wanted to know how to work it and then someone else said they knew nothing about video but wanted to know more. Well, I wonder what film making subject they chose for their presentation!

We were split into small groups of three and we had to come up with a subject. My idea was to make a documentary about taxi drivers and after some discussions I managed to persuade my two team mates to come on board. We were given a brief introduction to the camera and then we were off into Manchester to start interviewing taxi drivers and filming the comings and goings of cabs in the city centre.

We were rookies and we made a lot of mistakes. In particular, we didn’t think about the questions we were going to be asking the taxi drivers. We just sort of made them up on the spot but looking back it might have been better to have had the same questions ready for each new driver we interviewed.

A big issue that almost every driver mentioned was that the City Council was enforcing a new ruling about cabs being wheelchair accessible, which meant that drivers had to either buy a new cab or pay for a costly conversion to their current vehicle. Every taxi driver we spoke to mentioned this and they were clearly upset about it.

image courtesy wikipedia

Another thing the cab drivers pulled me up on was when I dared to call a private hire vehicle a taxi. Dear me no! Didn’t I know taxis and private hire vehicles were two entirely different things? Apparently not!

I think we spent a week going to the WFA in Hulme, picking up our camera and then getting the bus into town to start filming. We went to all the taxi ranks we knew. There was one at the top of Piccadilly railway station where we found quite a few talkative and sensible taxi drivers. Next we went over to Piccadilly itself where we came across a great bunch of drivers all trying to outdo each other with tales of drunken passengers and how Manchester City Council were trying to take too much money off them in licensing fees. At Victoria Station we met a very chatty driver who even wanted to show his singing talent. I felt his impromptu singing might have been a light hearted end to our video but my colleagues thought not. Oh well!

When we had shot a great deal of video we had to start editing and part of the training process was to screen a rough cut for the whole media school. In our film, one taxi driver had mentioned that certain places in the city were dangerous to go to as there was the possibility of passengers making off without paying or even robbing the drivers. The cabbie mentioned Moss Side, close to the city centre. One member of the audience complained that the driver was racist as Moss Side is a predominantly black area. I didn’t think he was racist; he just didn’t want to be robbed or lose a cab fare and didn’t care one way or another whether the passenger was black or white as long as he paid the fare. My co-directors wanted to cut the offending moment but I argued that the cabbie was just trying to highlight the risk factor in his job. I managed to win that debate and that scene was kept in.

Anyway, cutting the video and shaping it into something interesting was our next task and really the most enjoyable part of all. The big difficulty was that there were three of us, all wanting our own way and really the only way to make a video is for one person to have the lead. Anyway, we kept fighting to a minimum and most of the time we managed to either agree or come to a sort of consensus. The end result was a pretty reasonable video, at least I thought so.

At the end of the course I took away my copy of our video and started pestering documentary producers for the chance to make a full length broadcast version but I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere until I wrote to channel 4. I went down to see them, they watched the video and the first thing they said to me was ‘Why didn’t you get in the cab with your camera?’

Well, we had asked taxi drivers if we could do that and they mostly said ok but all of them stipulated that if a passenger wanted us out then we would have to get out, no matter where we were, so rather than risk being stranded somewhere we didn’t take any rides in the cab. Not only that, there were three of us carrying a rather bulky 1990’s Super-VHS camera, a microphone and a tripod. On hearing this the Channel 4 producer looked at me and said ‘If you were a real film maker you’d have got in that taxi!’ After that, despite my protests and assurance that I would get in the taxi when fully commissioned, numerous assistants arose, handed me my video and quite quickly I found myself out on the street!

That was my part of my brief foray into the world of TV. I never did get a job in television but then again, perhaps I just wasn’t as determined or as pushy as I should have been. The one job offer I did get was from a small video company that did a little work for the This Morning TV show. They offered me an unpaid job which apparently is the usual way into TV, working without pay until you show yourself good enough for a proper job. Sorry but I had a mortgage to pay so unpaid work just wasn’t for me.

Not long afterwards Channel Four produced a documentary series about cab drivers although mostly shot with small fixed cameras in the taxi. I still reckon they pinched the idea from me!

If you’re interested in seeing our Taxi video you’ll find it below. It’s actually one of my most watched YouTube videos.

Due to issues of drinking far too much wine and lying far too long on my sunbed, this week’s blog post was an updated version of a previous post. Normal service may or may not be resumed next Saturday.

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Making the YouTube Video

Posted on by Steve Higgins

One of my friends asked me about my videos the other day. He wanted to know if they were easy to make and how much I planned them in advance. Anyone who knows me will know that I don’t plan anything in advance but I thought it might be interesting to show readers just how I put together a video.

The Idea/Shooting

I did a video a while ago as part of a beta testing programme I was asked to take part in. The testing was for a new update over on Animoto.com which is an online video editing site. The new addition was the facility to add a voice recording to a video which I had actually advocated quite a few times on their Facebook forum page. The video I decided to make stemmed from a blog post about writing poetry and it was called Idea, Inspiration and Effort. Those three things were what I thought was required to produce a poem and to be fair they could be applied to anything, a poem, an essay, a blog post, a novel or indeed, a video.

Everything of course starts with an idea. What shall I write about or what can I make a video about? For me I tend to shoot all sorts of video and then only later start to think about how I can put it together and use it in a finished product. For the video mentioned above over on Animoto I chose a template from their fairly wide range and then it was just a matter of adding in the stock photos or video and then the graphics. Animoto provides stock photos which I do use regularly but if possible, I always try to use photos I have taken myself. For instance, I needed a sunset shot for this video and I knew that I had a shot of a sunset taken in Greece on the island of Kalymnos so I uploaded that.

Of course, for a video like that, not much actual filming was required but normally, filming is the first step in any video. One way to prepare for a shoot is to make story boards. They are used extensively in the cinema and I’ve seen documentaries showing wonderful story boards from films like Citizen Kane to Aliens. They are simply drawings that look like comic strips showing the visual look of each different scene. Good for films using actors but not much use for documentaries or short films, well at least, not in my opinion. I tend to film first and then plan later how to use my recorded video. Others might think story boards a great help.

Reviewing the footage.

A short video like the one above is pretty easy but for my most recent video, a compilation of GoPro video shot mostly through the windscreen of my motorhome, well that was a little harder. I had a rough idea what I wanted so the next step was just to review all my footage. That involved hours and hours of going through a lot of video, a great deal of which was not very inspiring. Many times, I had left my GoPro running when I should have shut it down. Other times I pressed record at some wonderful area of French countryside, only to find that the resulting video wasn’t so wonderful.

A GoPro Hero similar to mine.

The Rough Cut

After reviewing everything, I dropped all the better shots into my video editor and the result was a video lasting well over an hour. My big mistake on a lot of our French trips is not shooting much additional video.  I may have recorded us arriving at a spectacular lake but then I hadn’t taken the camera and shot around the lake. We’d take a trek around a lovely French village and again I didn’t shoot anything in the village. However, having visited France so many times I went back over all my older video looking for interesting things.

In 2020 we parked by the river Seine one day and I had filmed the ferry going across to the other side and a huge ship chugging serenely past. I had not used that footage in previous videos so I added that into the editor. On a number of occasions, I’ve tried to shoot things that motorhomers have to deal with as routine, things like emptying the toilet and the waste water and topping up the drinking water and so on, so I added a number of clips showing all those processes.

In Rouen a few years ago we were following the directions from the Google lady on Google maps when we found ourselves heading into a tunnel which I realised we weren’t going to fit under. Luckily there was an escape road and we were able to exit but when we passed the area again this year, I recorded us travelling past and so I was able to talk about the experience.

The Final Cut

Less is more has always been my video adage so I trimmed out more and more video until I was left with some short story blocks or chapters: Travelling through the channel tunnel, heading on south through France with a quick look at where we stopped in 2020 by the Seine. Going through Rouen and avoiding the low tunnel. Various camping sites. Maintaining the motorhome and emptying the waste. A final stop and a barbecue and then returning to home via the ferry.

Voice Over

The next step was to put together the narration. Sometimes I write a narration and then tweak the video to fit the text. On this occasion I decided to do something I’d done before which was to jot down a few notes and then just narrate the voice-over as I watched the video. I actually did it quite a few times. The first and second versions had a lot of ums and ahs but by the third time I finally felt I had something reasonable. My voice-over was more confident than the first two tries and by then I pretty much knew what to say without my notes.

Sound Effects

Next I add the sound effects. Now you might think there wouldn’t be much need for sound effects on a video like this, however there were a couple. On a sequence where I showed the outdoor laundrettes which abound outside supermarkets in France, I had combined some still shots with video so I added some washing machine sounds to cover that and on another sequence, I had slowed down a wobbly shot of a microlight flying overhead. The soundtrack was distorted at the slow speed so I added the sound of a light aircraft which was similar to the sound of the microlight.

Microlight

Where do I get the sound effects? Well Liz bought me one of those sound effect CDs a few years ago but sometimes I head for a site called Zapsplat to download some free sounds.

Just to finish I think it’s important to watch the final product from beginning to end and just look for things that could be tidied up. I added a sequence showing an antique telephone during a bit on the voice-over where I talk about telephones. There were still some superfluous scenes shot through the windscreen which were either boring or too long so I trimmed those down.

Titles and Credits

The final thing is to add the titles and credits. Now being an old-fashioned film maker, I’ve always liked good intros on films. These days in the world of YouTube and TikTok, those long title sequences are not recommended. While I’m trying to get my video started with a few titles and introductions, the viewer has already clicked on to another video so these days the advice is to make those titles and credits short and sweet.

What sort of video editor do I use?

Well I actually like the professional version of the Microsoft Windows Video Editor. It’s pretty simple to use and I always make my rough cut with it. If I want to play with the soundtrack I then take the video over to Power Director where you can do some more complex edits.

Uploading to Social Media

Once you have made a video you want people to see it so it’s only natural to upload to the internet. YouTube is the obvious choice. How do you get people to watch it though? Tricky question and to be fair, I don’t really know the answer. I upload my videos and link them to various other sites. I have quite a few pages on this site here at WordPress where I showcase my videos or use them directly within a post. I also link them to Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and other places that I feel are appropriate. For instance there is a Manchester community on Reddit so I’ll link my Manchester themed videos there. I link my poetry videos to either the Reddit poetry community or to my Writeoutloud poetry page. Over on Facebook there is an amateur video page where video producers showcase their work and chat about it.

One of my big mistakes is uploading to YouTube too early. Once I’ve finished a project, I’ll continue to fiddle with it and start to wish I had uploaded version 7 rather than version 1. A good video site though less popular than YouTube is Vimeo and the good thing about their site is that it’s possible to replace your video with an updated version without losing your stats and comments. Such a pity that feature isn’t possible on YouTube.

Just as I finished this post, I clicked on a video that came up in my YouTube feed. It was about Ridley Scott and the making of Alien. Scott did something special with Alien, he took what could have been a mediocre monster movie and made it into something special. He brought some great designers and a strong cast into the project, made his case to the producers for a bigger budget and ended up with an outstanding film. Preparation and design was the key to that film and preparation and design are important even in small projects like yours, mine and a thousand others you will see on Youtube.

What will your next video project be?

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Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.

Blogs, Video and a Social Media Marketing Mix

Posted on by Steve Higgins

The lockdown of last year didn’t really affect me that much. It was a bit of a pain not being able to go out and I did miss the pub quiz night as well as my visits to my favourite restaurants. Essentially though, I’m not an outdoor kind of guy. I like my TV and my laptop and I’m pretty happy sitting outside in the summer reading a good book. This last week I’ve been experiencing a more personal kind of lockdown. Liz has just had a hip replacement and I’ve been off work tending to her every need.

Even people who are close can have their differences. Liz likes to be challenged by word games and I like my challenge in the form of a good documentary film.

‘Not another quiz show’ I usually say when she has got the TV remote.

‘Not another Kennedy documentary’ she tends to say when the remote is over on my side. Oh well, recuperation is important and if she can put up with the occasional JFK documentary I can deal with another Countdown, I suppose.

When I’ve had a brief moment to myself, I’ve been looking at my book, Floating in Space, and wondering what more I could do to promote it. This entire blog is about promoting Floating in Space, at least that was the idea when I started. Every blog post, whether it’s about books, films, my life or any other random subject that comes to mind always ends with a little plug for Floating, right down at the end of the post. It usually comes in the form of a short video with the prime intention of making the viewer wonder if their life is worth living if they haven’t got a copy of my book. Most people and I’m talking a good 90% plus of people who decide to watch decide that life is worth living without a copy of Floating in Space and decline to buy. Pity, especially as I went to a lot of trouble making those videos.

A lot of people ask me about the title, Floating in Space. Why is it called that? Is it a sci-fi book? No, it isn’t which makes me wonder whether changing the title would be a good thing. The title comes about because of the way the main character, Stuart Hill, looks at his life. Sometimes it’s a good thing to look at your life not in little segments but as a whole. How could you possibly do that? Well Stuart does it like this.

Updated version of Floating In Space available now from Amazon!

This technique, for want of a better word, is best employed in the summer. Find yourself a quiet outdoor place. Lie down on the grass facing towards the sky. A clear blue sky isn’t much good for this. What you need is a blue sky and a good selection of white fluffy clouds. Now relax. A good way to do that is start at the top of your head and relax your scalp, then go down to your eyebrows and relax them. Then your eyes, nose and so on, all the way down to your toes.

Now, I don’t know if you can remember those visual teasers you used to see in comics years ago. For instance a line drawing of a cube which by an effort of will you could make into a solid box or, again using only your mind, see the box as an open box and look inside. That’s the thing to do now looking up at the sky. See the curve of the sky bending down towards the horizon at the extreme end of your peripheral vision? Well turn that around so instead of looking up at the sky you are looking down. Imagine you are floating in space, seeing the blue, not of the sky, but of the planet Earth and down below is you and your life, going about it’s everyday cycle of work, sleep and relaxation. Down there on the Earth are moments of enjoyment, moments of happiness, moments of sadness and sadly, moments of horror.

Most of my promotions for Floating tend to focus not on the process I’ve described above but on the city of Manchester where the book is set. I’ve only visited my home city once since the pandemic and it’s looking good. New towering skyscrapers seem to be going up with every month that passes by, at least according to the small group of Manchester photographers that I follow on Instagram. Manchester’s nickname is the Rainy City because of course it rains a lot and one of my favourite photographers makes a habit of photographing the puddles of the city, either with the city’s new buildings reflected in the water or low angle pictures with a rainy puddle in the foreground and some Mancunian architectural delight in the background.

When I visited Manchester a few months ago I took my camera along and made a bit of a walkabout video. I had my selfie stick and walked around chatting to the camera. I looked at some of the new hi rise towers and then walked round to the old end of town and took a stroll down the Rochdale canal which was completed in 1804. Instead of writing a narration I just stayed with the video of me chatting to the camera and added a few voice over comments and snippets of info. That video is currently one of my most watched videos so if I had any sense I’d probably make more of the same but it so happens I’m just not that comfortable walking around chatting to my camera. I much prefer my usual videos, many of which have voice-over narrations which originate in many cases from my blog posts. Like a lot of my blogs and videos, I can’t leave them alone, I’m always tinkering with them and here’s a case below, another edit of my favourite Manchester video.

I am of course an old school video producer. I like videos that open up gradually and have titles and an introduction. That technique, I am reliably informed, is very old hat indeed. In the 21st century social media world, videos need to be straight to the point. Quick introductions, a quick statement of your credentials, perhaps a brief exhortation for the viewer to subscribe to my channel and then wham, straight into the subject. That is internet video in a nutshell because there are thousands of other videos out there that are just a click away and can instantly nab your viewer if you fail to grab and keep their attention.

Getting back to blogging, I have probably written more words, in my blogs and tweets and other social media posts promoting my book, than are actually in the book itself. Oh well, that is one of the facts of the self-publishing world: Writing a book is one thing but marketing is an entirely different ball game altogether and of course the competition is fierce with more than 5000 new books released on Kindle every day! Is it worth it you might ask? Why do I do it? Well, quite simply I do it because I like doing it and when the enjoyment has gone, I’ll start thinking about doing something else with my spare time.

Nothing improves and hones your writing skills more than the writing process itself and as a blogger with a deadline of 10am on a Saturday morning I have even started to feel like something of a professional writer. Nothing gives me more pleasure than to log into WordPress and find that someone has liked one of my posts, or better still has left a comment. I’ve always thought that an intrinsic element of the human condition is finding that out that there are others in the world who think the same way as you do and like the things that you like.

I do tinker quite a lot with Floating in Space and some time ago I added a version which hopefully corrected the book’s various grammatical mistakes and I also added a small index to help explain 1977 to my younger readers. So, what else should I do to market my work? Another Tweet? Another Facebook post? Another YouTube video? Perhaps I should go further afield in the social media world and do more on Instagram or sign up for Tik Tok?

Actually I think I might just give marketing a rest for a while. Liz is still in bed so I think I might just relax for a while with Oliver Stone’s new Kennedy documentary.

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The Idea, The Inspiration and The Kebab

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A few weeks back I was asked to test some new editing software for a company whose software I used to use regularly. They were trying something new, in fact a feature that I had advocated a few times on one of their forums. It was a surprise to be asked to test the new feature but also rather nice. It’s always nice to be acknowledged so anyway as soon as the feature was enabled I set out to make a test video.

I thought about doing a new version of my usual content. You know the sort of thing, the videos that you usually find down at the end of my blogs extolling the virtues of Floating in Space and A Warrior of Words. Instead, I thought of doing a quick few minutes on the subject of poetry writing. It was called Ideas, Inspiration and Effort.

Nothing can start without an idea. Amateur writers like me just tend to wait for an idea to come but to be really professional you have to make the ideas come. You have to sit down and start writing. It’s only then that the ideas come. The same is true for blogs. I do get ideas. I get them driving to work. I get them while watching television. Sometimes I get no ideas at all but then I can always write about the books that I read, the old TV shows that I like and the classic black and white films that I watch on TV. Either way, blogs or poems, everything starts with the idea.

Next comes the inspiration. Again, when I’m in amateur writer mode I usually just wait for the inspiration to come. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. The thing that makes it come is just to start writing. Sitting down at the keyboard with the TV on and the sound off, that’s usually when inspiration strikes. Last week if you may remember I was doing battle with my electric company because they wouldn’t give me my money back, the money that I had paid, in error, into the wrong account. I wasn’t happy about it at the time but on reflection I could see the funny side and that is hopefully what made that particular blog post rather amusing. The good thing as well is that it’s that kind of self-deprecating humour which Floating in Space is all about so if you liked that post, you should like Floating. (An in-post plug for Floating! Hey, I’m pretty pleased with that.)

The same is true for poetry, once I have an idea I start playing with words until inspiration finally comes. Then of course I need to make the effort. The effort to get down to work, typing away until the first draft is ready. Then more effort comes, the effort to edit and to develop the blog or poem until I think it’s finished. That of course is where I usually fail. I don’t have my editor on my back, I don’t have a publishing company that has paid me a million-dollar advance and is waiting for the book I promised them. The only promise I have made is to myself, a promise to one day complete another book which actually may be a long time coming. The thing is there are so many other things to do, restaurants to visit, books to read, TV shows to watch and so on.

Anyway, it’s time for another blog post and as usual lately I’m struggling. What I need is an idea. So using my own method above I thought about an idea and I came up with disappointment. Yes, what has disappointed me lately? Let me see, well there was the pizza I made the other day.

When I spend a little time on my own I tend to eat a lot of snack food. I do love sandwiches as you might have guessed if you had read this old post about sandwiches but sometimes I like to do something a little more exciting. I do like cooking with my slow cooker and I’ve made numerous bologneses, chillis and curries in this way but the other day I thought I’d try and make a pizza, a proper pizza made from scratch. I had some flour and yeast and I had Jamie’s Italian, Jamie Oliver’s Italian cook book to guide me so what could go wrong? I mixed all the ingredients and made some basic dough then I gave it a good kneading and eventually I got a good spongy dough. I left it to prove and a bit later made it into a few portions. I left one to rise once again and made a simple tomato sauce using tinned tomatoes. Later I slapped on the sauce then some cheese, some pepperoni and some onions and I was all ready to bake. Jamie recommended putting the oven on its hottest setting, gas mark 9 so I slapped the pizza in and about ten minutes later it was looking good.

The crusts were ok but the rest was a bit soggy. Even so, it was pretty reasonable. The next day I tried again and looking at some other recipes I thought it was better to cook the base first and then add the toppings and cook again. I did that, added the toppings but this time I left it in too long and the pizza emerged a little frazzled. Maybe I should just stick with chilli in future.

Here’s something else that was disappointing. Sitting down to eat I was happy to find that The Time Tunnel, the sixties Sci-fi TV show was about to start on the Horror channel. It’s about two American scientists ‘lost in the swirling maze of past and future ages, during the first experiments on America’s greatest and most secret project, the Time Tunnel. Tony Newman and Doug Phillips now tumble helplessly toward a new fantastic adventure, somewhere along the infinite corridors of time’ as the opening blurb used to go.

The Time Tunnel starts off with a Congressman coming to investigate the growing budget of the time tunnel complex and threatens to close things down unless he sees results. Scientist Tony Newman decides he must therefore travel back in time to prove that the tunnel really works and save the project. Tony ends up on the ill-fated liner Titanic. His colleague Doug follows him back to 1912 and the control room struggle to shift the two in time before the ship sinks. Unable to return the duo to the present, the technicians struggle every week to shift the duo to somewhere new just in the nick of time. One episode that I particularly remember was when the pair land in Pearl Harbour, just before the Japanese attack in 1941. Tony meets himself as a young boy and finally solves the mystery of the disappearance of his father in the attack.

The Time Tunnel was a sci fi series from the 1960’s and as a child I was crazy about it. I thought it was wonderful but it only lasted one season before producer Irwin Allen moved on to something new. I had missed the first few episodes of this latest re-run but as I settled down I realised that my favourite episode, the one about Pearl Harbour, was about to start.

Tony lived there as a child and his father was reported as missing in action so the first thing Tony and Doug decide to do is to go and visit him. Cue some rather daft dialogue and some clumsy situations which led on to more clumsy dialogue and daft situations. What a disappointment that episode was and yet for years and years I’ve looked forward to finally seeing it again. There are some things which just don’t stand the test of time.

Another thing that I found rather disappointing this week was a large donner kebab. My last few shifts at work this week went pretty well and as I drove home after the last one I thought it was time to treat myself. I ordered a large donner with salad and chilli sauce, took it home and settled down with a small beer.

The salad was as limp as the Time Tunnel dialogue, the chilli sauce didn’t have much get up and go and the donner meat had seen better days. All in all, I could have done with a trip through the time tunnel to Manchester city centre in 1986 and gone to my very favourite kebab emporium where they served donner on naan bread with fresh salad and a tasty hot chilli sauce. Yes, I had the idea, I had the inspiration, I just wish I hadn’t made the effort and got that kebab!

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A Kind of Moany Whingey Sort of Blog Post

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As this is my 484th blog post I hope I can be forgiven for tending to repeat myself now and again. I’ve probably said this before but what the heck, I’ll take a risk and say it again; I really don’t like this time of the year. I don’t care for Bonfire Night or Hallowe’en and on top of that I’ve experienced some unmitigated disasters this week involving video cameras and my mobile phone. Anyway, what shall I moan about first? Let’s get Hallowe’en out of the way!

What is Hallowe’en all about and how did it creep over the Atlantic from the USA to the UK? TV is probably the culprit but basically Hallowe’en is an excuse for kids to dress up and knock on other people’s doors and ask for sweets. Go away! This is a Hallowe’en free zone! I keep meaning to put that up on a sign outside the front door but of course I never do, although either way, the neighbours have probably got the message because these days they just don’t bother knocking, so if there are any sweets around I’ll just scoff them myself.

On October the 31st the new series of Doctor Who began on the BBC. The 13th Doctor is of course played by Jodie Whittaker and for some reason the last time the Doctor regenerated into a new body, he or she found himself/herself this time in a female one. In some ways I kind of like Jodie as Doctor Who. She’s kept all the Doctor’s quirky elements and odd humour but instead of being a man, she’s a woman. Personally, all respect to Jodie, I’m hoping that the new Doctor – this is Jodie’s last series in the role – will once again be a man. I mean basically, that’s what the Doctor has always been, male. Of course, in the media there are calls for another woman to play the role and even for the new James Bond to be a woman or even a black man. The thing is if we are going to swap genders and ethnicity randomly why not remake Sex and the City with men instead of women? Why not have a white man playing Shaft?

Here’s an idea. Why not leave things as they are and perhaps make new productions for new female time travellers and new female black, Asian or even oriental secret agents?

Anyway, getting back to Dr Who, this new episode was actually pretty good although there were so many plot elements, I just wondered how they were all going to fit together. The Doctor’s new companion was played by Liverpool comedian John Bishop and he was actually pretty good. In one sequence he opened the door to some kids on Hallowe’en and gave them some sweets but gave short shrift to someone else who was knocking on the door just hoping for a freebie and who had not even dressed up. ‘On your way’ said John to that guy which just about sums up my feelings about Hallowe’en.

The other nightmare that occurs at this time of year is bonfire night. A long time ago a fellow by the name of Robert Catesby decided he wasn’t very happy with the government so he decided to blow the lot of them up. Funnily enough I’m pretty sure that is something the people of 2021 would like to do to the current government. Anyway, I’m not sure what Catesby was planning to do next, take over or start a revolution or what but he and his fellow conspirators, the most famous of which was Guy Fawkes, were apprehended before they could light the blue touch paper on the gunpowder plot and were quickly dealt with.

These days a fellow like Guy Fawkes would be suing the government and claiming legal aid and all sorts of stuff. Back then we didn’t mess about, we just chopped off the guy’s head. Case closed. Actually, not quite case closed because every year on November the 5th, we light bonfires and let off fireworks to remember him. Perhaps this is a subtle message to the government, a reminder that the people can only take so much or perhaps it’s just an excuse to let off bangers and rockets at all times of the day and night for weeks on end either side of the 5th and annoy the hell out of everyone.

I arrived home on bonfire night and believe me, it felt a little like I had been transported to a war zone with great explosions going off around me and sudden unexpected rockets taking off from every corner. I’m glad that’s over anyway, well just as soon as everyone has finished off their firework supply.

At Liz’s house she still has an old fashioned coal fire and I have to admit that it’s nice sitting by the fire with a bottle of wine just on the hearth gradually coming up to serving temperature. The big pain is having to go out in the cold and rain to fill up the coal scuttle and to light everything on a cold morning instead of just clicking on the central heating button.

The other night having made a superb fire I realised I hadn’t filled up the coal scuttle so I had to go out in the rain and cold and fill it up. It was a little dark out there so I took my phone and lit up the torch so I could see where I was shovelling the coal. What a great idea to take my phone out. Wrong because like the twit that I am, I left it there in the rain and it got totally drenched.

When I remembered it and retrieved it, the phone was soaked through. At first it seemed in pretty good shape but then it kept switching itself off and on. Liz had heard it was a good idea to put the phone in a bag of rice which was apparently sure to soak up the moisture. So while that was drying out I thought I’d put the sim card in my old phone. It used to have a serious battery problem which is why I bought my latest phone. Anyway, after charging it up I thought I’d just slip my sim card in. Wrong. My old phone takes a mini sim and my new one takes a nano sim and I couldn’t find the adapter to fit my nano sim into the mini sim slot! Technology! If they are not changing from VHS video tapes to DVDs they are changing sim cards to infinitely smaller ones.

What made the situation worse was that I was expecting a telephone consultation with my physio so I really needed that phone. Of course, I could have called them up and explained the situation but the phone number was on my phone, you know the one in the bag of rice that wasn’t working. I was also expecting a couple of other calls too but once again the only contact details were, well not accessible. Amazing isn’t it just how much we rely on our mobile phones.

Here’s another disaster that happened this week. Disaster is probably too strong a word but it’s something else that goes with this week’s general theme. My latest video Return to Manchester over on YouTube was a walk around Manchester taking in some new hi rise buildings that are changing the shape of my home city and a quick look at the old Manchester, namely the canal that runs through the centre and dates back to the industrial revolution of the past. I made it pretty quickly and instead of writing and narrating a voice over I did it off the cuff, just working from some notes. For some reason it seems to have done pretty well as far as viewers are concerned and as usual, I can never understand why. Why does a blog or video that I have worked hard at do not so well, and something else that was a rush job seem to be popular? I get lots of feedback from both YouTube and WordPress in terms of statistics and analysis but I never really know what to do with it or learn any lessons from it.

Last week I thought I’d make a follow up video with a tram ride up to Manchester Airport and do some similar stuff, a walk round and chat to the camera. I also thought that I could combine some elements from a video I made in 1986 at the airport and compare how things have changed. Return to Manchester Airport sounded like a good title too.

Things didn’t start well when my GoPro camera wouldn’t charge up. I had my trusty Canon GX7 with me but I had wanted the GoPro to take some additional stuff. Luckily in my bag I had my cheapo action camera with me. It’s a cheap GoPro copy that takes reasonable video. Anyway, the tram arrived which I filmed on my Canon. I nipped aboard and went to a seat at the front where I clipped my handy suction mount to the window and pressed record. Well, I thought I had pressed record but in fact I’d pressed the wrong button and nothing happened, not that I realised it at the time. I left that to its own devices and shot some hand held stuff with my Canon. At the airport I had a wander around and filmed some chatty stuff to the camera then went down the walkway towards terminal 2 which incidentally, in a few short days I’ll be flying from!

Later, on the way back to the bus station my trusty Canon declined to record any more. The memory card was full but did I have my spare memory card? That would be a no. That was when I realised that when I was on the tram I’d been pressing the wrong button to start recording on my action cam so I hadn’t shot anything of the trip up towards the airport except for stuff I’d shot with the Canon. OK, keep calm, press the right button now!

Back home I found I had only a short burst of video on the tram and had nothing at all of the bus and tram station. However, I did have some in car video I had filmed during the summer of part of the route. It was actually a part that had changed substantially because of the new tram route and I also had some video from 1986 showing how things were many years ago. Yes, in a burst of creative editing kudos I was able to cut all that together and actually put a video of sorts together.

The good news is that I was using the wrong charger on my GoPro camera. I found the correct one and now it’s fully charged up. A bit late in the day for the airport video but ready for action on my next production. The really good news was that a few days later my phone, fully dried out was back in action again. Note to self: make sure you keep that coal scuttle filled up Steve!

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The Big 65

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Birthdays are not something I look forward to these days. Years ago, when I was a school boy I did look forward to them, at least I think I did. Now I come to think of it, I’m not sure I was that bothered about them even back them.  I do remember as a schoolboy being very impressed with the film 2001 A Space Odyssey and I started working out if I stood a chance of being alive in the then distant year of 2001. I was 45 in 2001 which to a young schoolboy must have seemed pretty ancient. Add on another 20 years and that same schoolboy would surely have imagined himself as a decrepit old guy barely alive in 2021. The thing is, despite being 65 I don’t really feel that old, at least, not inside.

Back in 2016 when I was a young whippersnapper of only 60 I wrote a little tongue in cheek piece about my birthday:

2016

At a press conference this past Monday morning at Wetherspoons in Southport Mr Higgins, reputedly now 60 years of age, was asked numerous questions about his advancing years. He was heard to ask “Pint of lager, please mate,” numerous times but did not seem willing to discuss his birthday further.

Although Mr Higgins seemed somewhat reluctant to engage with people, he responded to a question about television in the early years of the second half of the twentieth century.
He confirmed there were, in the 1960’s when he was a child, only two TV channels. There were further gasps from people when he mentioned, almost nonchalantly that he and his family were at one time forced to watch programmes in black and white!

As Mr Higgins moved onto his next pint he enlarged upon his theme. “Yes, in those days there was no colour TV, no internet and no mobile phones.”
“How did people send messages?” one journalist asked.
“Well,” said Mr Higgins. “The only way was to get some paper and a pen or pencil and laboriously write out a message. Afterwards it had to be sealed in an envelope and posted after of course, adding a stamp.”
“What, you mean it wasn’t free?”
“Of course not!” snapped Mr Higgins, rather testily. “Not only that, you had to take it round to the post box and mail it yourself.”
“How long would the process take?” asked another.
“Well, it could be anything from a couple of days to almost a week”

A young lady reporter fainted and was revived by splashing cold water on her face. As she came round, she looked up at Mr Higgins and asked, “How did you carry on, how did you survive?”

“Well,” answered Mr Higgins. “I suppose we were a tough generation. It was hard then. You lot have things so easy!” Returning to the bar, Mr Higgins waved over to the bar staff and commented. “This lager is a bit naff. Have you got any dark beers? What about a pint of mild?”

Picture courtesy perfectpint.com

Picture courtesy perfectpint.co.uk

“Mild?” replied the barmaid, a young Romanian girl of about nineteen. “What iz zat?”
Mr Higgins looked a little frustrated until the bar manager came over and revealed that Theakston’s mild was one of the guest beers that day. Mr Higgins immediately perked up and called for a pint.
“Lovely jubbly.” he commented, “Cracking pint! Now, what else do you lot need to know? I’ve got some serious drinking to do.”
“What about films?” someone asked. “Surely it was just like today; I suppose you could download a movie onto your tablet and watch at your convenience?”
Mr Higgins, now onto his fourth pint seemed to jump on the word tablet and exclaim “Tablet? In my day that was something you took for a headache! If you wanted to see a film, you had to go down to the picture house, pay your money and go in and get your seat and watch the film.”
Someone asked if the term ‘picture house’ could be explained.
“The picture house! Cinema! A big place with a huge screen where they projected the picture!”
“Do you mean you had to sit with other people?”
“Of course you pillock!” replied Mr Higgins. He turned back to the bar just as his all day breakfast arrived. “Right, that’s it now. If you want to learn about the old days, like the seventies, just get yourselves a copy of my book, ‘Floating in Space!’”

Yes that was the 1970’s; no internet, no mobile phones and a pint of bitter was only 25 pence.

2021

As it was my birthday I had arranged a pre birthday date for lunch and drinks with my brother. I was staying at my mother’s house and I fancied a look around Manchester. I had not been to the city centre since 2019, before the pandemic and every time I look at Instagram or the photography page I follow on Facebook, I keep seeing photos of new space age hi rise buildings and I wanted to take a look myself.

I planned on going early into Manchester so I gave my brother a quick call so as to arrange where we could meet. My brother however told me he wasn’t feeling well and was staying in bed. Well, I wasn’t happy but no amount of cajoling could get him to change his mind. As I sat on the tram travelling into town I started to think about making a video. I had my camera with me so I decided to leave the tram at Deansgate where I knew that some new skyscrapers had been built and then just follow wherever my camera or my nose took me.

At the end of Deansgate on the far edge of the city the builders had created a whole new complex of hi-rise buildings called Deansgate Square. There was an interesting mural there with a short history of Manchester from the first Roman fort in AD79 to the industrial age and right through to the present. After shooting a lot of video I wandered back towards the station and decided to drop down to the canal. The canal runs right through the middle of the city centre largely unseen, hidden by the large buildings and in some places disappearing into tunnels. I came across a canal barge navigating one of the locks and got chatting to the occupants. The barge was a hire boat and came from Middlewich but the crew were surprisingly from Washington in the USA. They showed me how to navigate through the canal lock, opening and closing the lock gates and opening the water valves to raise the boat up to the next level.

Later I walked down Oxford Road and found myself drawn to the old Refuge Assurance building. When I started my working life at the tender age of 16 my first job was as a clerk in the Estates department of the Refuge. Construction on the building began in 1891 with a final extension completed in 1932. It’s a grade 2 listed building finished in red brick which today is known as the Kimpton Clocktower Hotel. I entered through the side entrance, the one I last used in 1977 and walked through the tiled entrance hall into what used to be the main office. It was still pretty quiet and various people were sat in the luxurious lounge eating and drinking. I ordered a pint of lager and found myself a comfy seat where I sat and drank and let my mind wander back to 1973 when I first started there.

1973

In the Estates department my job was to collect the rents we were owed for numerous properties in the city centre, enter them in a ledger and bank the money. Another job was to allocate a proportion of the fire insurance to our tenants, based on the floor size they rented. One incident that sprang to mind was something I’ve written about before but is worth telling again. I came into work one day to find that there was the hum of excitement in the office and my colleagues and I were advised of the imminent arrival of a million pound cheque.  As I was only a mere teenage accounts clerk,  I was running low on the pecking order to see this cheque, although it was actually my job to process it as I did with all the other cheques that came into the department. In due course, one of the very senior managers came down with the cheque and with great reverence it was handed to my boss Mr Ross. Mr Ross perused the cheque for a while along with a small clique of other managers and then conveyed it to the senior clerk, Mr Elliott. After marvelling at this great artefact for a few moments, he then passed the cheque to me. Numerous staff members from our and neighbouring departments also came to take a peek at this financial wonder which I believe, was the result of the company either selling off our sister company, Federated Assurance, or doing some fabulous property deal.

Anyway I did my job and duly entered the cheque into the ledger then put it in the safe ready to go down to banking prior to 3pm, as in those days, banks closed at 3pm. ‘Good heavens!’ declared one of my managers, ‘we can’t just leave the cheque there, think about the interest!’ So I was despatched on a special journey to the bank for this very special cheque. Actually that suited me quite well. After paying the cheque into the local bank I sauntered round the corner to the sandwich shop, ordered sausage on toast and made my way quietly back to work. Just as I arrived back in the office I realised that the senior management staff were still there, waiting for news. Were there any problems? What had happened? They seemed rather disappointed when I told them that no cataclysm had occurred, the bank had not come to a standstill but the million pound cheque had been routinely deposited. Thinking back, I’m not sure I liked the way they were looking at me, perhaps they knew all along I’d been to the sarnie shop!

2021

I finished my drink and walked back up towards St Peter’s Square. Back in the late seventies I used to spend my dinner break there on warm summer lunchtimes, eating my sandwiches and reading whatever book I was hooked on at the time. Things have changed in the square too, the seating area has gone and most of the area has been taken over by the trams.

The trams run every few minutes and I saw one approaching and so I ran up the steps and jumped aboard. I had shot quite a lot of video that day and already I was thinking of how I could put it all together and so I spent the next day glued to my laptop doing one of the things I love the most, editing video. I normally write a narration for my videos but this time I thought I’d put together one off the cuff. That is I made some notes and then switched on the microphone and started talking. The result was a verbatim commentary rather than a pre written narration. It’s not quite as fluid as I would have liked but it seems to work.

When the actual day of my birthday dawned I was feeling a little miserable. Perhaps it was the sudden onset of the cold wet weather or it might have been one of the symptoms of getting old. Anyway, I cheered up after opening my cards and presents and later Liz treated me to a meal at a lovely Italian restaurant. Yes, some garlic bread, pasta and red wine can go a long way towards cheering up an old codger like me and let me leave you with what I thought was a particularly interesting way of looking at the big 65 . .

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