Crapchester in the Snow

Crapchester in the Snow from Doc Sleaze on Vimeo.
With the media trying to scare us with speculation about a freezing 'White Easter' at the end of this week, I thought I'd take a look back at the first of the two snowy spells we've already endured this month, courtesy of the footage I shot at the time.  The first shot is from about halfway down my street, but most of it was shot in the local park.  A local park which, as you'll see, includes a small aviary full of budgies, parakeets and finches.  Quite why it is there, I don't know, but it has been there as long as I can remember.  Anyway, this video is the first I've edited on my current laptop using Movie Plus, a long discontinued film editor formerly produced by Serif, which I had on my old laptop.  I finally dug out the DVD and registration key over the weekend and got it up and running on this machine.  I've tried using various other video editors, all supposedly more sophisticated and up to date that Movie Plus, but found them all unusable for one reason or another.

But to get back to the video, it's surprising the extent to which a dusting of snow can transform a familiar place into something strange and beguiling.  In places, my mundane local park looks like a winter wonderland under the snow.  There's one bit, with a large concrete building seen distantly through the snow, (it's actually the main block of a local school), which vaguely reminded me of some of the early Helsinki sequences in Billion Dollar Brain when I watched them back.  (Not that I'm trying to compare myself to Ken Russell - my shot was purely accidental, whereas his were carefully composed with artistic intent).  Still, now that I've finally got a usable video editor loaded on this laptop, I can start looking at a backlog of video footage I have, with a view to producing a few more films.