The three weeks of he Festival Fringe are enough to keep Screenco's representative Jon Baverstock on his toes around the clock. The highlight of this year was undoubtedly the scheduled appearance of Joan Baez, Emmylou Harris, Chrissie Hynde, Billy Bragg and Steve Earle in the Ninth Landmines Charity Concert. But for many of the support shows Jon Baverstock was made to think on his feet. "We have also been wandering round with a team doing bits for the Film Festival and the Book Festival," he said. "We have set up a non-linear edit suite which we are running with a four-camera PPU - so we can take footage for screen commercials or VTs and play them in, enabling them to be edited while they're being transmitted. We are also streaming footage onto the Arts for Life website and sending edited packages down to Sky TV."
Working with so many casual crew Baverstock quickly got into a routine of garnering the newsreels and show content during the day and editing by night. "Both the facilities and the requirement have increased radically since we last did Edinburgh," he said. And where the Screenco inventory has been unable to fulfil some of the more unusual requests, the chances are that Jon would have devised a solution in the form of an accessory from his 'spares' bag.
An instance of this was when the cast for an Alice In Wonderland production turned up with a projector and wanted to project doors onto the 15mm screen (making them appear to get bigger as Alice got smaller). Fortunately Jon was able to produce a scan converter, which allowed him to place their 'doors' onto the screen - and achieve the desired effect.
(Lee Baldock)
