On polishing turds.

First off, the Amanda Palmer gig was excellent, lots of music, fun and some... dancing. We were even treated to a reading from Miss. Palmer's boyfriend; one Mr. Neil Gaimen. That was slightly unexpected. Once again, we ended up very close to Amanda as she decided to entertain her queuing fans by performing on song with a ukulele while standing on top of a bin on Lothian Road. Good times. I even got attacked by a puppet of a conjoined twin wearing a T-Shirt which read "AFP Is Not Your Bitch." The car journeys there and back again were also highly chucklesome. It was a jolly good night.

On a completely different subject, it occurred to me that I have seemed to spend a lot of life lately disguising turds. There is a saying "You can't polish a turd, but you can disguise it." Basically; rubbish will always be rubbish but you can usually fix it slightly so it's not as bad. This was done a lot while I was at college, trying to make crap performances and recordings sound good and I'm doing it still, but with different media.

I make DVDs for the local theatre company in this area. The last show - as was commented on a lot around April - was The King And I. This was a complex production which took place in the assembly hall of the high school (now the old high school; it's currently being torn down) and the show had two casts. Well, one and a half, really. Two Annas, two Tuptims, two Chulalongkorns and two sets of Siamese children. The King was the same throughout the run and a few other cast members didn't alter either.

Because of the (for sake of argument) two casts the show was filmed on two nights, so everyone involved was on film doing their thing. However Saturday's show was filmed using a camera recording to an SD card and was filmed at very low quality, making it look very blocky with terrible sound. Again, people expect me to be able to work miracles with these things and I simply can't. Again, you can't polish a turd.

If I had better video editing software then maybe. But I don't. I don't even get consulted on how these things get filmed, never mind that I'm the one that has to deal with them, that's not important. I'm currently trying to locate a good camera that will sort these problems and allow me to edit the shows a bit faster.

Even if I do find a new camera (and convince the people that matter to spend £1000 on it) another problem is soon going to present itself. The theatre has just got a lot of money to fix things that need fixed; the dry rot, for example. There's new foldaway seating going in too, meaning that we won't be able to position the camera where we would usually. So I'm going to have to go in once it's all finished and work out where's best to put the camera, or it will change from show to show and anger me.

However, I'm really happy that the theatre has got this money; it'll be nice not to worry about falling through the ceiling while in some of the upstairs rooms.