Embedded Files
Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication - School of Broadcasting
Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication's School of Television and Broadcasting had a brilliant reputation and therefore was supremely hard to get into, as I discovered by completely failing to impress them first time round.
I did however get a place on my second attempt following these simple steps:
Sold all my stills photography kit and bought a second hand, 20 year Arriflex 16mm camera from the National Physical Laboratories at Teddington
Made a pretty dreadful short comedy film, with my pals Jonathan Pyle and Ian Chrichton
Blag free 16mm negative developing from Rank Laboratories
Blag free wet-gate Telecine transfer to SVHS from TVi production facility in Wardour Street, London
Blag 2 days time on an SVHS Edit suite from local company Harpers AV to cut and mix.
On reflection I think it was more down to my blagging free stuff skills than the quality of the film that got me a place on the course.
Only took me a year's work , but I got a golden ticket - I was in!
I recently was in Chislehurst and decided to pop back and see the old campus. It wasn't there - it's now a housing development, so sad.
Ravensbourne has moved to a swanky new site opposite the O2 Arena and it's now a University in its own right.
Unbelievably, I discovered the A/B SVHS rushes tapes of my Ravensbourne application film in a mouldy carboard box in the shed Christmas 2020.
After 28 years the tapes had mildew and had partially perished, but yet they were just about playable on an old SVHS deck I managed to repair and digitise with a very cheap USB capture gizmo off Amazon.
Between the two tapes I managed to just about salvage almost all of the usable takes, albeit with heavy dropout. Unfortunately the voice track that was dubbed directly to the edit master is long lost, so you'll have to use your imagination....
Anyway, long story short, that's what got me in to Ravensbourne. God only knows why!
Report abuse